Sugababes
Angels With Dirty Faces

THE REVIEW

The Sugababes managed, during the last decade, to carve out a very respectable niche in the multifaceted English pop scene of a thousand and one synths, a significant piece of well-produced popular music that was, however, swept away by a series of changes and replacements that were far too annoying and entirely detrimental to the integral purity of one of the most creative and prolific girl groups in the English-speaking world.

The trio, originally composed of Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan, and Siobhán Donaghy at the launch of the Sugababes project, debuted with One Touch, but it was only with the arrival of the more promising and charming Heidi Range - replacing the discreet Donaghy - that they inaugurated a series of chart hits with the subsequent Angels With Dirty Faces, Three and Taller In More Ways; in 2006, satisfied with a long list of top ten hits at home and abroad and triumphing with the first greatest hits collection Overload, the Babes couldn't preserve the second (and more lucrative) lineup, losing all the original members of the band along the way: initially, the defection seemed limited to Mutya Buena, but later involved the last of the founders - Keisha Buchanan. The reorganization, also pushed by managers and record labels, led to the inclusion of new Babes who were overly attractive and had modest charismatic potential in terms of creativity and musicality; sales numbers declined, and their last effort, Sweet 7, confirmed the failure of the new formation, completely detached from the intrinsic value of their beginnings.

Yet, despite the confusion and devastation due to continuous replacements, the Sugababes 1.0 and 1.1 should be counted among the brightest stars in Her Majesty's mainstream context. Almost on par with illustrious female quotas in music like All Saints, Mis-Teeq, and Girls Aloud, the Babes were able to effectively break the persistent link between girl groups and trashy and/or teen music, an annoying cliché tending to associate the aforementioned groups with the 90s bubblegum wave of the Spice Girls. In short, with the advent of the new millennium, all this feminine pop goodness left behind the frivolous and ever-changing multicolor nature of the Spice Girls, leaving droves of feverish teenagers behind. Gone, then, are the school dance sounds ala Britney and the Disney-influenced newcomers to make way for a blend between the black trends made in the USA and the genuine Anglo-European underground tradition.

The Sugababes, in my very debatable and refutable opinion, have better interpreted this change of direction in the female pop universe, producing a good handful of studio works with various facets. Angels With Dirty Faces, second album and first with the blonde Heidi, was the jack-of-all-trades of this sort of "neopop," an album extremely rich in sounds and full of tones, shades, and moods, from the cheeky R&B-Hip Hop winking at the overseas gangsta babes to chart-topping alternative, through classy electronics, sprightly punk-rock, and some bold garage-trip hop nods. The result manifests in a well-crafted composition, well-produced, a refined pop that flirts with major magazines, fierce chart competitions, but also the more discerning palates and the most skeptical and stubborn ears, especially in the often too glossy and flashy mainstream environment.

From the very beginning of the tracklist, entrusted to the gritty and feline synth-rock of Freak Like Me, the album roars with huge creative potential: from the electro-freaky Round Round - a classic of the Babes - transitioning to the fun and glittery punk-hip hop of Virgin Sexy, to the mischievous techno-funky of Supernatural and the avant-garde dubstep-R&B experiment of Blue. The already rich table is completed by Stronger, a touching ballad with synth undertones, the ghetto-glitch mischievous electronic of Angels With Dirty Faces, the acoustic-unplugged closing parenthesis entrusted to Breathe Easy (Acoustic Jam) and the melancholic Shape, a sort of midtempo-tribute to Shape Of My Heart, interpreted by the veteran Sting nearly a decade before.

It's sad when a great pop project falls to pieces due to the capricious "I wanted, strongly I wanted" of the majors and the necessary decline into the abyss of excessive attractiveness and sexual-erotic overexploitation to replace good "music for all tastes" done well, with passion and determination. Still, this very enjoyable album remains, a work conceived without too many superficial aesthetic planes (just look at the artwork of the covers of the first works to support this thesis), but with the convention of producing a tasty work accessible to pop lovers, maybe a bit mischievous and teasing, yet devoid of the stifling fiery red, the main common denominator of a music biz where the split between creative validity and the visual-representational proposal of projects seems impossible to achieve.

Sugababes, Angels With Dirty Faces

Freak Like Me - Blue - Round Round - Stronger - Supernatural - Angels With Dirty Faces - Virgin Sexy - Shape - Switch - More Than A Million Miles - Breathe Easy (Acoustic Jam).