Teenage Lesbian Love Angst Bile Situation (Dangerous And Moving - t.A.T.u.)

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Product:	Dangerous And Moving - t.A.T.u.
Date:	07/05/06 (336 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not your average girl band

Disadvantages: Not all that different from the first album

Once tagged "the most controversial band in pop", t.a.T.u. returned to the charts in 2005 after a two-year absence. Personally, I'd pretty much forgotten who they were and I don't think I was alone in thinking that they weren't really missed. Yes, they came up with some fairly catchy pop / rock but they always struck me as a two-hit novelty wonder. Hell, they couldn't even win the Eurovision Song Contest.

So why then, did I buy their new album? It was All About Us that did it. With its hypnotically addictive chorus line, I loved the tune from the first moment that I heard it on one of the music channels. It did OK for itself, chartwise, but it didn't set the world on fire. The album, Dangerous and Moving, was released shortly afterwards but that didn't set the world on fire either. All this is actually quite a shame because I think Dangerous and Moving is pretty good all in.

If you've never heard of t.a.T.u. it wouldn't surprise me. The name is pronounced "tattoo" but I couldn't begin to tell you what the initials stand for, if anything at all. The group was spawned from the imagination of a Russian video director named Ivan Shapovalov who, in 2000 destined to play simultaneously on both the sexual inhibitions and inner prejudices of the world at large. Two young girls (they're actually in their twenties) provide the vocals, more often in English and spend every waking moment of every performance cavorting around in school girl outfits and leading us all to believe that they are embarking on a torrid lesbian affair. Whether you liked their debut song All The Things She Said or not, you couldn't escape the lesbian-styled video (actually a lot of fuss about nothing) and for a short while t.a.T.u. were on everyone's lips.

The musical style is nothing particularly innovative - a simple blend of trance-like female vocals, normally laid over a semi-raucous rock soundtrack or otherwise layered over a synthesised backing that's come straight from the eighties. Over the last few years, it hasn't really moved on much either, but it actually ages quite well, never sounding fresh but never really sounding dated either. The girls both have good voices; not strong, powerful or dominant, but often quite haunting. They complement one another very well with only subtle differences between the two of them. It's enough to know there are two separate singers but in the midst of a "rawk" guitar solo these nuances are generally lost - and not really missed.

Dangerous and Moving is typical t.a.T.u. fodder. It doesn't really have a theme or a point and comes across rather like the rambled musings of a pair of angst-ridden teenagers, criticising, and venting their hormonal spleen at everyone and everything in their way. The album is often about love, but seldom in a gentle, endearing or romantic fashion. Common themes in Dangerous and Moving tend to be revenge, hatred, betrayal and confusion. The sexuality remains confused but, quite cleverly, there is some progression from the first album here in that whatever lesbian feelings they had on album one, something has changed, at least for one of them who, on one or two songs, is in a right pickle. The album isn't a storyline. It's more a random outpouring of confused feelings and ambling rants. Punk / rock this is not, however, and most of it is very radio-friendly, as All About Us capably proved.

Lyrically, I find t.a.T.u. rather interesting. Appreciating the commercial limitations of a 100% Russian-language soundtrack, the larger part of the album is sung in English, but it's an odd kind of clipped English that oozes character. Rather like Abba's queer Swedish lilt, the two t.a.T.u. girls generally sound like a pair of disturbed Balkan prostitutes and I like this. You could never mistake them for yet another faceless British girl band kitted out in mini skirts and tit tape. I quite like their basic edginess. It's never garish enough to make them unsettling but in comparison to the likes of Girls Aloud, they are refreshingly individual, even if the whole lesbian thing does start to wear thin very soon. None of the songs is particularly well written, generally comprising short strings of words rather than carefully crafted, meaningful lyrics, but this grammatical brutality seems to complement the music perfectly.

Initially, I had to be in the right mood for Dangerous and Moving but as I've grown accustomed to the music, I've actually found that the album contains different tracks that complement my different moods. I seldom manage to listen to more than four or five tracks in one session and would never pretend that the finished article is a flawless classic. The flow of the tracks simply doesn't lend itself well to this, lurching from pop/rock anthems to sugary little ballads and back again without a blink of the eye and it doesn't always work very well. This aside, however, the tracks are generally quite short so anything that grates is soon over if you don't feel like skipping about and despite running to 14 tracks in total, the complete running time is only just over 50 minutes.

Disregarding the initial, pointless intro (which is actually just a fifty-second snippet from a later track) Dangerous and Moving opens in the right way with the likeable single All About Us and keeps things at the same tempo for the following three tracks. Loves Me Not strikes me as a very likely single, generally mirroring the arrangement of All About Us and giving the girls an opportunity to bemoan the problems of being in love with both a man and a woman. It isn't the most enduring of songs, but for stroppy teenage sexuality it pretty much does the trick. A much stronger, haunting song resides at track four (Loves Me Not) with it's gorgeous dreamy, piano-led verse dropping into the raucous, energetic chorus.

After the initial burst of energy, things calm down for the gentle love song Gomenasai, which arguably doesn't fit very well at all. Craving keeps the pace fairly gentle too but in case you're starting to nod off, the pace picks back up with Sacrifice. The next track, We Shout, is very unusual indeed. At times, it plays like an ambient house song, with it's mellow, subdued tones and gentle beat, but the electric chorus then seems to draw it back to the 80s or 90s. It's a lovely tune - neither love song, nor rock song but a good chillout song throughout.

But it's when t.a.T.u. get nasty that things work really well and despite the Dangerous and Moving album title, they really only do this once or twice on the album. Perfect Enemy is a slice of genius - nothing more or less. An anthem to being a bitch, Perfect Enemy progressively announces the girls' refusal to be nice about things and why they are indeed the "perfect enemy". Accompanied by a sinister, mid-tempo, synthesised instrumental I think the song is fantastic and arguably the best on the album and with lyrics like these, nobody will argue:

You don't turn me off
I will never fail
Things I loved before
Are now for sale
Keep yourself away
Far away from me
I'll forever stay your
Perfect enemy

After the stalker's anthem, there is really only one other track that stands out on the album and that's the title track, included in both English and native Russian versions. It makes absolutely no sense at all ("Their lives are yellow black" ??) but it holds together pretty well and has an incredibly catchy chorus that few listeners will be able to shake off and best demonstrates the girls' complementary vocal styles.

For me, this album was a real grower, something that initially I quite liked and now generally really like. I think there are plenty of candidates for future singles here but whether the music-buying public has much of an appetite for t.a.T.u. remains to be seen. Since their last album, I'm not sure they've moved on terribly far and I think most people will generally fail to be drawn to this album. I think this is a real shame, because underneath the shameless lesbian marketing, exists a group that really do stand a chance of making their mark on the charts.

Summary: Balkan Psycho Pop For Stalkers