Scouting for Girls

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Scouting for Girls

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I first heard "Elvis Ain't Dead" on a Virgin Radio stream and immediately felt the need to own it. The vocals are engaging, the sentiments are wonderful and the hook is unbelievably perfect. I wound up buying the single, and then the single of "She's So Lovely" and the single of "It's Not About You". I did NOT buy the complete cd initially because it was way more expensive than it is now...but when I saw the price of the followup single "Heartbeat" I decided to fork out the big bucks and put all of my eggs in one basket. The result is one of the most satisfying musical experiences I've had in a decade. Scouting For Girls are very British and very upbeat. They have some noun/tense problems in their lyrics that drive me mad (e.g.: "she's so extraordinary/she left last January/and that's the reason I miss you so"), but apart from that they have the most amazing hooks which get me up and positive and singing on the top of my lungs. In my car and in my house I find myself singing "Heartbeat" more than any other song...what a breath of fresh air these guys are...I can hardly wait for them to release something else. IF you are afraid to take a chance on bands you don't know much about this is the one to relax and get your feet wet with...RUN to to the end of the diving board and jump off without a care in the world. I promise you that you will have a smile on your face from the moment this cd hits the deck.

There's a kind of grim, depressing inevitability about this.

It's like the stone thrown up by a lorry that hits YOUR windscreen or you agonizingly realising that brown lump under your shoe isn't a dropped Mars bar or some clogged up leaves....

'SFG' works like this; something hurtles towards you, you think it's gonna be really painful and bad......and it is.

Apart from giving me the raving needle, there is SO much fundamentally wrong with 'SFG'. It doesn't work on ANY level, it can't be sympathetically reviewed in any context, even sarcastically.

It's a flat, eggy pancake of an album. It's a desperate worry as to what kind of rhino-headed cabbage would consider that this in any way resembles good music. It scores nought in the melody stakes, nought on the lyrical scale, but it wins handsomely the plankton-would-find-it-insulting league.

They've tried desperately to produce it to decency, but underneath the surface shininess the cracks are showing all over the place.

The workings of this particular trick are wonderfully/horribly visible, involving that heady and ghastly notion that endurance and hard work are in some way substitutes for talent and colour.

'SFG' are grey and dour. Maladjusted socially inadequate noodles who are touring the country as I type, under the grotesque disillusion that they are in some way a pop group. Their debut album indicates otherwise;

'She's So Lovely' is a disgrace of a song. 'James Bond' has lyrics a sub-literate loonie could better, and probably worst of all (an accolade I suspect it knows it deserves) 'Elvis Ain't Dead' - a despicable runt of a tune, operose and overweening, twitches to death right at the albums heart.

Enough. 'SFG' is a somnifacient disaster. It has an air of resigned failure akin to that of a one-legged cricket in a field full of crows.

The Amazon night vista is despairingly star-less for this one, that's why I really wanted to like it - blow a contrary wind and all that, but not even in a satirical sense could you award this desperation anything other than one appalling star.

And that's the worst name for a pop group since Heloise and the Savoir Faire.