Girls Aloud are ace

There have been many excellent reviews of Girls Aloud's new album, Out of Control. I second everything they write. Lyrically, it's top-notch, and fabulous singing and vocal moments abound. Such as these ace bits:

• The Promise: Huge girlpop anthem, giving everyone a chance to be girlband fabulous. You're gonna make me, make me love you... and a massive key-change.
• The Loving Kind: Majestic, brittle, beautiful, making me wonder if love is all about the little things.
• Rolling back the rivers in time: Gone are the days of magic sings Nicola, directly referencing another of their songs, It's Magic
• Love is the Key: opposites attract, and now we're picking out the towels and curtains
• Turn to Stone: Electropop!
• Untouchable: Without any meaning, we're just skin and bone. Like beautiful robots, dancing alone. WOW.
• Fix Me Up: a plea for all my sexual healing sounding oh-so like "homosexual healing". You know, you go, girls.
• Love is Pain: oh oh oh oh Love is Pain oh oh oh oh you're insane oh oh oh oh
• Miss You Bow Wow: an ace title, and basically is 4 choruses (chorii?) strung together into one huge song. Massive sing-a-long I remember in one of these many chorus moments
• Revolution in the Head: Girls going dancehall. Gimme the ting, gimme the ting, gimme the oh oh oh - and making it work.
• Live in the Country: cow sounds! cat sounds! pig sounds! It's joyfully bonkers, and yet totally in Girls Aloud's oeuvre as a logical response to Swinging London Town
• We Wanna Party: It's vintage Aloud: we're-famous-and-fucked: disillusioned with my dreams, got life confused with my designer jeans.

Overall: a brilliant, grown-up, sonic and lyrically superb album with songs which both refer back to earlier songs and move their style onwards.

Girls Aloud! Sexy! Yes Yes Yes!

The new Girls Aloud single: Sexy! No No No.

OMFG.

Amazing.

It makes me want to be a teenager again.

• It's all swooshy, drivey, whirly and amazing.
  
• It starts all Cheryl-in-vocoder, and reminds me of Eiffel65. This is no bad thing.
• Then it thumps in, and there's a 'dialogue' between Cheryl and 'the girls' about whether she did this, that or the other to some bloke she' met.
• Her replies are: No no no, No no no, No no no, Hell no, No No No, No no no, No no, no, Hell YEAH.
• Then there's more No No No bits and a verse.
• Nadine sings "d...d...dirty mind" recalling Grafitti My Soul.
• I'm sure some Popjustice types will decry some of the girls' absence, but Nicola can be clearly heard grunting "Uh Uh Uh" at one point.
• Then there are Woo Woo bits.
• It's all about singing in duplicate and triplicate. Amazing.
• It's very Sex and the City gone hyperdance whacked up and crazy. Girls Aloud - the logical mid-00s UK successors to Carrie Bradshaw et al?

Hurrah for Girls Aloud. They bring sunshine into even the wettest of summer days.

Here it is, via youtube and some random dance video:

Girls! Aloud!

I've been to see Girls Aloud play their Greatest Hits tour in Wembley. In a word, it was amazing. I love their songs, their attitude, their style. The audience was a hugely diverse mixture - young kids, gays a plenty, indie boys, Essex girls, trendy girls, New-Rave "youth of today" and many more besides. Girls Aloud seem to succeed by mixing quite complex, layered and referential pop music and lowest common denominator styling, and somehow pull this off with ace personality.

The Best Bits:

• Entering and coming down onto stage on a platform.


• Nicola, despite allegedly being Miss Body Issues, wearing the most revealing clothes of all 5. The minx was loving it.


• The band, great as they were, were kept well hidden at the sides of stairs with dancers to the forefront.


• The Hunky dancers, especially when wearing ripped shirts and ties or nothing at all. One long, lingering shot of a dancer's chest and torso proved there was certainly a gay in charge of the camera.


• Their dodgy covers were rescued by: Synchronised Strutting during Walk This Way, hunky dancer pelvic thrusts for Jump, and an amazing finger-clicking bit in I Think We're Alone Now.


• Cheryl Cole totally over-sexes her dance moves, especially during Something Kinda Ooh. She's fabulously filthy.


• Three dancers brought out nunchucks at one point. It's always nice to see violent weaponry on stage.


• Nicola's miserable puss for the "frankly I don't even care" lyric in No Good Advice was a joy to behold.


• Dance routines with canes.


• There was an odd Dirty Dancing routine but, sadly, no time for a 'Nobody Puts Nicola In The Corner' skit.


• A whole lot of shimmying, shaking, thrusting, lurching, head swishes and hair swooshes - especially during Wake Me Up and Money.


• The hunky dancers were hidden under bedspreads for The Show, and the song's "I won't sex you until I say so" message was given a whole Benny Hill chases around the bed treatment. Brilliant.


• Biology! Literal dance interpretations of "a girl's got to zip it up" and the tick-tock-clock dance move.

More pictures on Flickr, if you are interested.