We Started Nothing - The Ting Tings
Well… i’ll be honest, at first I really didn’t quite ‘get’ the Ting Tings and what their music was actually about. But eventually I purchased the album to find out what all the fuss was about and gave it a good listen and to say the least, it’s surprisingly catchy for such repetitive lyrics and beats.
Firstly, you may have heard the singles, “Great DJ”, “Shut Up And Let Me Go”, and “That’s Not My Name” which are all extremely catchy songs and great choices for singles. These songs make “Who Let The Dogs Out?” sound sporadic and fresh, in fact many of the songs by the Ting Tings are very repeititve, but they know how to a create a song that shifts in tone, key, and tempo from start to finish to bring the listener on a journey through the song rather than idly listening.
However that is not to suggest that the music is deep and intense, in fact it’s clear that it intends to be the opposite, light, fun, and edgy music that you can sing along to easily. Roughly half of the album sounds like it’s coming from your neighbours garage, very raw, basic, but yet catchy. Prime examples of this would be the title track and “Traffic Light”which are utterly forgettable yet relaxing.
The album’s best song is undoubtedly “Shut Up And Let Me Go” which is fantastic, the beat is so engaging and the vocals are very edgy, the video is also something I would highly reccomend upon first listen of this song. Other Highlights include “Fruit Machine” which I interpret to be a song about Pokie Machine’s, “You keep playing me like a fruit machine, putting in change systematically, winning streak that you had over me, turned into your broken tradgedy”, it has a good message! “We Walk” is up tempo and defintely one of the songs worth a listen.
Overall the Top Listens on the Album would be “Shut Up and Let Me Go” “That’s Not My Name” “Keep Your Head” and “We Walk”
The album gets a rating of 2.5 stars. They really come out with some great music, and they evidently have diverse talents, but it would be nice to listen to a sophmore album from them that has a few less of the 12 year old garageband songs, and more of wha they seem to do best, light, catchy, up tempo anthems. Their recent live performances of late seem to suggest their second effort may be even better.
