Girls Aloud
The Sound Of: The Greatest Hits
Despite their fabricated formation through a television program called Popstars: The Rivals, Girls Aloud achieved both mainstream success and widespread critical acclaim in their native England. Through Popstars’ process of elimination, Girls Aloud’s membership amounted to Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts, Cheryl Tweedy, and Kimberley Walsh. The group took shape in November 2002, and soon began a streak of Top Ten singles that broke a record for girl groups and remained unbroken through the end of 2006, when the compilation The Sound of Girls Aloud: The Greatest Hits was issued. Their first three proper albums — 2003’s Sound of the Underground, 2004’s What Will the Neighbors Say?, and 2005’s Chemistry — were similarly successful, though the latter stalled at number 11 on the album chart.(AllMusic.com
Here is the info file from the torrent>:
GIRLS ALOUD – THE SOUND OF: THE GREATEST HITS, album released October 30th 2006.
Encoded 192Kbps [Lame] mp3. Covers included.Created from TV talent show Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, Girls Aloud have achieved notable success, with thirteen top 10 hit singles in the British charts [including two number one singles] and three hit albums. Internationally their music has also been released throughout UK, Europe, Australia and Asia.
For a modern pop group, they have received unprecedented praise from broadsheet newspapers and the rock music press, with publications including the Observer and the NME giving rave reviews to their music. All of their thirteen singles have entered the Top 10 of the UK Singles Chart, a feat no other girl group has ever achieved and surpassing the Spice Girls record of ten. They are also one of the few reality TV acts to have had continued success.
The Greatest Hits was released on October 30 2006. From early mid-week reports this album is set to be Girls Aloud First ever Number 1 Album. The lead single from the album is Something Kinda Ooooh, which was released on October 16th 2006 on downloads, and October 23rd 2006 on physical formats. The video features the girls driving sports cars in front of a green screen showing the streets of London, with the girls dancing in front of strobing lights.
Tracks:
01 Sound Of The Underground
02 Love Machine
03 Biology
04 No Good Advice
05 I’ll Stand By You
06 Jump
07 The Show
08 See The Day
09 Wake Me Up
10 Life Got Cold
11 Something Kinda Ooooh
12 Whole Lotta History
13 Long Hot Summer
14 Money
15 I Think We’re Alone NowTHE VIDEOS [mpeg SkidVid]
Ripped from TV, edited, no logos and encoded 352 x 288 mpeg-1Girls Aloud – I’ll Stand By You [2004][SkidVid]
Girls Aloud – Something Kinda Ooooh [2006][SkidVid]
More of my audio/video releases, including their 2005 Christmas Limited Edition, 2CD album of Chemistry, plus 2 more SkidVids can be found at http://torrentbox.com/account-details.php?id=28701Enjoy, skirgsk.
Girls Aloud
The Sound of Girls Aloud /
[Polydor; 2006]
UK pop group Girls Aloud have always come on like a frenzied, fever dream of a pop group, grown in laboratories and let loose on an unsuspecting public with predictably violent results. So it’s no surprise that their greatest hits, arriving after only three album’s worth of singles, is as exhausting as it is captivating, a whirlwind trip through bizarre but lovable pop gadgetry that may leave the uninitiated reeling.
The story of Girls Aloud is as much the story of Xenomania, the reclusive pop production team whose vision shines through every song here. The performers remain a key ingredient, demonstrating an impressive knack for perfectly executing the demands of their material. If I don’t know who is who and who does what, it’s largely because their strident, at times obnoxious, performances rarely slip up enough for me to wonder. Their brief is to be snotty sirens, delivering reference-laden one-liners with their tongues stuck firmly in their cheeks. One-liners they are: While Girls Aloud are frequently blessed with excellent lyrics, their clever allusions are usually more amusing than affecting, with only the unalloyed spite and frustration of early classic "No Good Advice" and the gentle tenderness of recent ballad "Whole Lotta History" really cutting through.
But Girls Aloud don’t need to steal my heart when the rest of me has already been seduced by their deathless hooks and multi-genre pyrotechnics, starting from new wave drum & bass and expanding to embrace elements of electroclash, big beat, and even skiffle, in songs stuffed to the gills with two, three, sometimes four different choruses, sounding like patchwork assemblages of the best bits of a hundred fantasy pop songs, smoothly and effortlessly changing gears at a moment’s notice.
The greatest advantage of the Girls Aloud/Xenomania combination is the sense of simpatico which allows the respective parties to push themselves further than they would otherwise– the only faltering moments here are the straightforward covers of the Pointer Sisters’ "Jump (For My Love)" and the Pretenders’ "I’ll Stand By You", uncharacteristic crises of confidence in the unpredictable pop nous of the partnership. Always good for a chorus, the risk for Girls Aloud and their producers is that of stagnation: The three new songs’ churning, steroid-pumped electro-pop (think Bananarama meets Transvision Vamp) is enjoyable but also less startling than before, a refinement of an already perfected blueprint. Having come to rely on Girls Aloud outflanking them at every term, fans are unlikely to be inclined to settle for less.
Posted to Pitchfork by Tim Finney on December 14, 2006.