Your favourite Saturdays member. Okay, your favourite Saturdays member who sounds like an ecstacy dealer, then.
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[5.00]
Scott Mildenhall: A major label commitment to a Saturdays solo career in 2017 strikes as being born of either forlorn hope or tax avoidance. Let’s just say there was no way Flo Rida was reciting their names from memory. But maybe, along with Aston Merrygold, Mollie King could follow in Alesha Dixon’s footsteps. A Strictly win brought good will, and subsequent good music cemented her celebrity until the present day and beyond. Like with Simon Webbe, people can be made to care about pop band also-rans. And the Dixon comparisons can go further: both have leant on Xenomania for brassy brassiness. “Hair Down” may not be the conceptual masterwork that “The Boy Does Nothing” was, and nor is Mollie half the vocalist of Alesha, but it is fun enough to have a chance of capturing attention.
[7]
Iain Mew: Pleasure-centred maximalism still works its tricks. To come off as exciting as even a lower order Girls Aloud single like its cousin “Sexy! No No No,” though, it would need to come with the same feel of freewheeling audacity. Mollie King, for career and vocal and being-one-person reasons, is not in the position to bring the high stakes required for entry to that game.
[6]
Kat Stevens: I will overlook the barbershop diss (my Mum has attended her barbershop chorus rehearsal every Wednesday night for the last 30 years, it makes her very happy) and the fact that Mollie does not don a John Motson sheepskin during the sporting metaphor middle eight, because this is the farty, parpy Xenomania banger I’ve been waiting for, for… *looks at watch* about seven years now?
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: The horn riff might be the kind of thing that in 2012 one might have considered generic, but now ends up being clearly cornball. Mollie herself is enjoying being as crass as possible, and that does everything to prevent the hammy joke lyrics from being too grating. In general, the song feels like one of its overemphasized punchlines, and leaves the listener glancing around wondering if something good is coming along afterwards.
[3]
Alfred Soto: She sings like Julie Andrews lecturing kids for eating candy.
[3]
Tim de Reuse: I was tired of the three-note motif that comprises this song’s central hook by its fourth or fifth repetition, but the mood doesn’t really change when that garish thing is out of the room. Nearly every section is just as overstimulating, stuffing the midrange with sound effects and synth brass and background vocals, leaving a dry FM bass to kind of shyly clunk along in the back where no one can see it. Would this be worth listening to if it were re-arranged and re-mixed in order to approach the barest requirements of listenability? Eh, probably not. I don’t think even Eno-level production chops could force the rhyme of “barbershop quartet” against “getting any sex” into a palatable context.
[2]
Edward Okulicz: For a while, I was convinced Xenomania could do no wrong; their mid-2000s run of hits and should-have-been-hits was so bracing, so inventive, so stuffed full of ideas. When they ran out of gas somewhere towards the end of Girls Aloud’s lifespan, I felt so disappointed. The time away from being commissioned to do high-priority singles hasn’t done them much good — this is annoying parping, desperate and with one idea. It’s like at their nadir, they were forced to write a self-empowerment track for Jennifer Lopez against their (and her) will.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: “Scared of the Dark” : “Hair Down” :: the disco era : the mid-’00s, where this would be the greatest thing off a lost Promo Only CD of C-listers. I swear to God that isn’t faint praise. I have the Sarah Whatmore and Rosie Ribbons songs to prove it.
[7]