Alphabeat - 'Fascination'

 

The question is: are Alphabeat the new teeny-bopper fodder from a money-hungry record company, or are they just crap? With a Sesame-Street name and a video looking like Saturday morning TV they certainly seem to be aimed at a younger audience, but Fascination is a little too shoddy to be a lucrative, big cat scheme.

Fascination tries to be the quintessential catchy pop tune but misses the mark. The success of pop that we all love to hate is that it lodges itself firmly in our heads and sticks like bubble gum. Make someone listen to S club 7 and watch them squirm, but they’ll be singing it all day, guaranteed. This doesn’t quite have the same effect. We are immediately thrown into a hookless spiel of bland lyrics, only to be spat out the other side wondering which part the chorus was.

The recording itself is a train wreck of a mix with no dynamic diversity to speak of. The producer obviously misread the how-to-mix-a-successful-pop-song manual and instead threw everything in together and whacked the faders up. The result is a jangly mess of shrill guitars that clashes with the relentlessly doubled vocals. These days, quality pop songs are made at the mixing desk, with production much more refined than the artists that sing them; that’s its charm, and that’s its success. Fascination flops before it’s even out the door because it leaves a ringing in your ears instead of a tune in your head.

The lyrics also fail to engage with the target audience. With the High School Musical hype bringing back the teen-pop craze of the late nineties there is a path being paved for songs like Fascination. And while the first verse (“teenage, in the pace age/that's when love burns”) outlines Alphabeat’s target audience, any teenager that reflects on of adolescent life as being fascinating is probably far too busy doing advanced maths to be out ‘joyriding in the moonlight’.

If teen-pop is back in the limelight, Fascination is unlikely to be the anthem this time. Teenagers are impressionable, but picky and Alphabeat don’t quite make the grade.

Hannah MW (MuHead) 

Fascination is out now on EMI 

Get Fascination from Play.com or iTunes

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