I don’t know what happened. A decade ago Sugababes were making sassy and rocky En Vogue-esque R ‘n’ B (to reminisce: ‘Overload’, ‘Round Round’ and ‘Freak Like Me’); now all of a sudden we’re left with the quivery blonde one and two total strangers – none of them founding members – and Sugababes amount to nothing more than a non-Japanese Toyota, all the parts having been replaced with skinnier, younger and less exciting fixtures.
But we must press on with the three Splendababes we have left, and Sweet 7, their seventh album in 10 years and first since signing with Jay-Z’s label Roc Nation.
Last year, the surviving Brits joked that Rihanna had become akin to a fourth member of the group (erm, shouldn’t that be seventh?), apparently “listening to all our songs and saying what she liked and what she didn’t like.” This goes some way towards explaining why Sweet 7 sounds exactly like a collection of Rihanna cast-offs and B-sides, only I imagine the harsh melodies on ‘She’s A Mess’ might actually sound quite punchy coming from the voice box of an edgy Barbadian megastar, instead of a rather shrill Liverpudlian.
Yup, gritty distortion is the order of the day and the whole blasted thing sounds like it was produced by a malfunctioning coffeemaker, fueled by a compulsion to sound really sultry all the time.
‘Get Sexy’ is sultry in an angry way, I suppose (although none of the fun of sampled Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ makes it through the AutoTune mill), but even tracks like the Ne-Yo-penned dronefest ‘No More You’ sound like they were recorded with a man in the next booth motioning to the tragic threesome to push their cleavage out a bit more on that last verse.
Rapping reggae star Sean Kingston at least adds some brief vocal variation on ‘Miss Everything’, and single ‘About A Girl’ is catchy enough – but all the chantable dancefloor hooks in the world won’t make up for lazy schmaltz like ‘Sweet & Amazing’ (which is neither) and some unforgivably atrocious lyrics (‘Bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle’, ‘Give me what I need/ That Gucci, that Louis V/ That’s how you spell l-o-v-e’). I suspect Rihanna was taking the piss, girls.