Tangled Up by Girls Aloud
Tangled Up is the fourth studio album by the British all-female pop group Girls Aloud. It was released in the United Kingdom on 19 November 2007 by Fascination Records. Like their previous albums, Tangled Up was crafted by the production team of Brian Higgins and Xenomania. Tangled Up explores a more electronic aspect of pop music. Tangled Up was mostly praised by contemporary music critics upon its release. The album spawned three top ten singles, including the highly successful "Call the Shots", and received a platinum and gold certification in the United Kingdom and Ireland respectively. The release was followed by 2008's Tangled Up Tour, Girls Aloud's fourth concert tour. The album has sold 490,000 copies.
In the half decade since Girls Aloud were formed on <i>Popstars: The Rivals</i>—during which they released three albums and a greatest hits collection—the band had graduated from manufactured reality TV construct to become the most successful girl band in UK chart history, notching up more Top 10 hits than the Spice Girls. Nadine, Sarah, Cheryl, Kimberley and Nicola, at least according to them, were no longer the gobby teenagers and notoriously outrageous young women of the past. This new-found maturity perhaps explains why the kitchen-sink approach adopted by Girls Aloud’s regular songwriting and production partners Xenomania has been reined in a smidgen on the group’s fourth album <i>Tangled Up</i>. It is, in fact, a far more sophisticated-sounding record. That’s not to say that Xenomania and Girls Aloud’s innovative approach to pop is absent; there’s still a lot of weirdness to be found. Those wondering what the industrial edge of Pendulum’s rock-laced drum ’n’ bass might sound like paired with a melody lifted from a Pointer Sisters song will have their curiosity satisfied by the charging electronics of “What You Crying For”, while fans of Blur’s “Song 2” and Geri Halliwell’s spoken word verses in the Spice Girls’ “Naked” might find something to enjoy on the pogoing “Fling”. Meanwhile, “Can’t Speak French” is as preposterous as it sounds, smushing together jazz melodics, plastic ’80s electronics and a swinging beat, the band insisting that they’ll “let the funky music do the talking” over a backing track that is as far from funk as you can imagine. Still, there’s a traditionalism that prior Girls Aloud albums shied away from. “Black Jacks”, a Northern soul-indebted swinger, follows a more conventional song structure than “Biology” ever did, as does the scuzzy handbag house of “Girl Overboard”, an aching cautionary tale about excessive partying and falling off the wagon. “Call the Shots”, a glitter-soaked electro ballad, has a similarly melancholic texture. “I won’t cry for all the hunger in my heart,” Nadine sings on the pre-chorus, before Cheryl and Sarah add: “No, I won’t cry because I’ve stumbled through this far.” It’s a rare glimpse of vulnerability from a band renowned for their ballsiness and sees Girls Aloud subverting expectations once again. It’s understandable why so many consider it, and <i>Tangled Up</i>, their crowning achievement.
