Saturday, July 24, 2004
A Load of Maracas
They're back! Yes, you may well have thought that the curiously sexless and quite probably men in a previous life Cheeky Girls had been deported back to Romania for their crimes against music, but no, it turns out that even their home country is somewhat ashamed of their unique talents so they've sent them straight back to us and they're about to take their revenge by unleashing a brand new single on to a general public who aren't so much disinterested, but are more vehmentaly opposed to even the merest hint of a comeback.
But lets not dismiss it out of hand immediatly, lets give it a cursory listen and then dismiss it with the weight of facts behind us to back up our opinion. It's actually a surprising change of direction for the Mischevious Minxes, a string-drenched ballad of epic proportions which surges out of the speakers with a tidalwave of heartfelt emotion which will cause even the strongest man to break down in tears and... Oh, OK, we're lying, but it will make you cry for the state of pop music. It's called Cheeky Flamenco and it's the expected musically simplistic up-tempo track with Gabrielle and Monica singing, in the loosest sense of the word, a couple of repetitive lyrics over some half-assed novelty spanish guitar playing. While we didn't exactly expect anything earth-shatteringly different from them, we didn't expect it to fit into the "more of the same" box quite as easily as it does. We're sure that their fans, and there must be some, will lap it up. They certainly seem to have hit upon a winning formula, even if that formula seems to be thinking of a noun and putting the word "Cheeky" in front of it. We're sure though, that the Cheeky record label will soon be sending them to the Cheeky job centre where they may find their experience on the Cheeky Checkout on Top of the Pops Saturday turns out to be more useful than they may have expected.
But lets not dismiss it out of hand immediatly, lets give it a cursory listen and then dismiss it with the weight of facts behind us to back up our opinion. It's actually a surprising change of direction for the Mischevious Minxes, a string-drenched ballad of epic proportions which surges out of the speakers with a tidalwave of heartfelt emotion which will cause even the strongest man to break down in tears and... Oh, OK, we're lying, but it will make you cry for the state of pop music. It's called Cheeky Flamenco and it's the expected musically simplistic up-tempo track with Gabrielle and Monica singing, in the loosest sense of the word, a couple of repetitive lyrics over some half-assed novelty spanish guitar playing. While we didn't exactly expect anything earth-shatteringly different from them, we didn't expect it to fit into the "more of the same" box quite as easily as it does. We're sure that their fans, and there must be some, will lap it up. They certainly seem to have hit upon a winning formula, even if that formula seems to be thinking of a noun and putting the word "Cheeky" in front of it. We're sure though, that the Cheeky record label will soon be sending them to the Cheeky job centre where they may find their experience on the Cheeky Checkout on Top of the Pops Saturday turns out to be more useful than they may have expected.
