Girls Aloud, What Will the Neighbours Say?

Good tunes and witty lyrics? Girls Aloud aren't your usual pop automatons, says Alexis Petridis 4 stars (Polydor)
What Will the Neighbours Say?

At first glance, the sleeve notes to Girls Aloud's second album seem no different from those on any other pop CD of recent years. God gets a thank you, nans and granddads are offered "loadsa luv" and every sentence ends with an exclamation mark, like the front page of Pravda before the fall of communism. But closer inspection reveals something curious about their tone. Gratitude is undercut by shock at the longevity of Girls Aloud's career. This began, it should be noted, way back in the dimly remembered days of December 2002. "I can't believe I'm writing credits for a second album! It's fantastic!" gasps Kimberly Walsh. "Wow! Another year, another album!" offers Sarah Harding.

You can see why Girls Aloud might have expected to spend December 2004 on the counter at Argos rather than at the top of the charts. They emerged victorious from Popstars just at the point where the novelty began to wear off: their fellow winners, One True Voice, were committed to history's dustbin in a matter of weeks. Since then, Girls Aloud have had many obstacles to overcome, not least those presented by their stylist, the unpromisingly named Kenny Ho. His ministrations invariably leave the five band members looking like oversized Bratz, the grotesque "fashion dolls" currently cluttering the shelves at your local Toys-R-Us. And yet, in the sleevenotes, Ho gets thanks, rather than the P45 he deserves

Far more gratitude, though, is lavished on Brian Higgins, and rightly: his Xenomania production and songwriting team are the reason behind Girls Aloud's relative longevity. The two songs that open this album, The Show and Love Machine, are perfect examples of Xenomania's uniquely rousing approach to pop. The former is based around a frantically exciting electronic noise that seems to have escaped from an early-1990s rave record. The latter sounds, incredibly, like the Smiths' Rusholme Ruffians colliding head-on with that band's musical nemesis, chirpy 1980s synth-pop.

Listening to What Will The Neighbours Say?, you constantly get the impression that Higgins and Xenomania are enraptured by the possibilities of pop music in 2004. Several of the weirder musical concoctions on the album sound like they began life as outlandish what-ifs: what if you married an alarmingly fast techno thud to an implausibly dumb three-chord garage rock riff (Wake Me Up)? What if the Prodigy hadn't turned down the chance to write with Madonna (Graffitti My Soul)? What if, for once, the ballad on a pop album didn't make you want to vacate the room immediately (Deadlines and Diets)?

The results are so spectacular that you rarely notice Girls Aloud's voices, which are in tune, but so devoid of emotion you begin to wonder if English is their first language. What's even more remarkable, the girls are usually singing something interesting. Someone at Xenomania has a knack for writing witty couplets: "On the table and on to the floor, it's procreation and nothing more." Someone else appears to be indulging in a furtive attempt to see what they can get away with. "As I'm going down, I'll grin," a Girl Aloud sings, without a flicker, during Deadlines and Diets. "I've got a fistful of love and it's coming your way," deadpans another, divertingly, on Graffitti My Soul.

When anybody else gets in on the act, What Will the Neighbours Say? goes awry. The Pointer Sisters' Jump was covered at the behest of Richard Curtis, for the soundtrack of Love, Actually. Xenomania throw everything they have at the track, but can't rescue a duff song. Similarly, a version of the Pretenders' I'll Stand By You commissioned for Children in Need, is a thing of death-dealing tedium.

At least the band members' own attempts at lyric-writing aren't as damaging. At worst they're merely cliche-laden, but at best their guileless, untutored approach results in something divertingly weird. Thank Me Daddy usefully suggests Girls Aloud's pubescent listenership lie to their parents about their sexual exploits, while the impenetrable Big Brother could be about anything, up to and including the admittedly unlikely topic of sexual subservience to a totalitarian dictator.

Ultimately, you cannot escape the feeling that What Will the Neighbours Say? achieves greatness despite, rather than because of, the group whose name appears on the front cover. This is certainly an odd state of affairs, but it does not stop it being a great album: funny, clever, immediate, richly inventive.

For Girls Aloud, the message of What Will the Neighbours Say? is thumpingly obvious: stick with your current producers, and you'll be writing sleeve notes, rather than packing shelves, for many Christmases to come.