a review of...
By Caitlyn Hallman
Ah, the pop gimmick, so often maligned; so little celebrated. Yet ever now and again, there comes a gimmick so ingenious, so remarkable, and so absolutely stunning that you just can’t help falling down on your knees and praising the Lord above for someone actually thinking of it. t.A.T.u. is one of these special times. For not only are they teen-aged schoolgirls, not only are the Russian, BUT they are also lesbians. If that’s not every fantasy of a heterosexual man rolled into one tidy package, I don’t know what is. It’s even better than the Cheeky Girls with their hot pants and identical looks.
Their first single ‘All The Things She Said’ has swept the world (with just a little help from the accompanying video of the two girls snogging…in the rain…in school uniforms). However, even without the graphics, it is still a craicing tune. Great production value, fantastically hummable chorus, and lovely vocals. It sounds like ABBA for the 21st century. Like many of ABBA’s best songs, it tells a complicated love story (about a girl falling in love with a girl) in simple terms and, on this track, the girls’ voices have a similarly lispy quality. As first records go, ‘All The Things She Said’ is very promising indeed.
Unfortunately their first album 200km in the Wrong Lane, doesn’t live up to this promise. In fact, it all goes horribly wrong. I wanted to like it. I really did. I wanted to make t.A.T.u. my new favorite band, but I couldn’t do it. The rest of the album is boring pop drivel sung with screechy, shrilly, little girl vocals. Where are the lovely harmonies of ‘All The Things She Said?’ They seem to have been replaced by shouting.
While ‘All The Things She Said’ seems refreshing in the honesty of its emotions, the rest of the songs become repetitive. They all deal with the same issue but not as concisely as ‘All The Things She Said’ does. You start to feel that if you heard one song about lesbianism and teen angst, you’ve heard them all. All the tracks plead to ‘Mommy and Daddy’ for understanding. All the songs speak about going insane. Blah, blah, blah….They actually start to make being a Russian, teen-aged lesbian sound boring.
As pop gimmicks go, t.A.T.u. is truly brilliant, but the idea of them being lasting artists is truly laughable. As I write this, they are already on the fast track to one-hit wonderdom. (Perhaps that’s why the album is called 200km in the Wrong Lane?) So with this in mind, let’s all enjoy the snogging girls while we can.
