PCD is Pretty Chuffing Decent! (PCD - The Pussycat Dolls)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	PCD - The Pussycat Dolls
Date:	30/07/06 (557 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some good pop-R'n'B songs

Disadvantages: The cover versions

The Pussycat Dolls are really the ultimate in manufactured pop acts, although the way they’ve been manufactured is slightly different. Rather than finding a name for a group and fitting people in with that name or picking people on a TV show and then moulding them into a group, with The Pussycat Dolls the name came first. They started with the name, famous in the US since the mid 1990s as a group of women who frequently performed at the Viper Rooms in Los Angeles, a club owned by Johnny Depp.

Even before the name was used for a pop act, they were already famous, having from time to time contained some of America’s greatest singers and actors, even if only for one performance. Could the girls selected for the pop group of the same name be as good or become as famous as those in the club act?

The album opens with the UK Number 1 single “Don’t Cha”. It’s very much an indicator of the music scene as it is at present. It’s a mixture of pop and R’n’B, possibly a little more towards the R’n’B end of the spectrum than the likes of other pop girl groups. Add a rap interlude to this, another standard of this kind of music and you have the perfect R’n’B track, if there is such a thing. Of course, the main lyric “Don’t Cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” makes you wonder if this song has any worth if my girlfriend is, indeed, hot like they are.

The opening to the next track “Beep” makes me think of Destiny’s Child, but the feel is a lot more funk based than pop based, so the overall sound is more along the lines of The Black Eyed Peas, with the lyrics making me think of “My Hump”. Much like the opening track, it’s the perfect summary of the music scene it has been released into, fusing funky R’n’B with a slight pop edge.

The opening of “Wait a Minute” makes the album feel like someone has taken a list of modern R’n’B artists and made sure that the Pussycat Dolls have a song that imitates each of them. There are distinct hints of Outkast in the intro, although when the song is just the girls, the comparison is less obvious and it’s a fairly straight R’n’B track with a pop edge again. As with the two tracks that have gone before, however, you can see why this would be a hit in the clubs as it’s ideal dancing music. Or it would be, if I had any idea how to dance to this kind of thing.

No album, especially a pop one, is complete without a big radio friendly ballad. “Stickwitu” is The Pussycat Dolls effort at this and, as with much of the album; it’s a pretty impressive one. It has a very old school R’n’B ballad feel to it, which harks back to the likes of Shola Ama in the 1990s. There’s nothing really new or different about the track, but you don’t tend to expect that from a group of this type. As pop-R’n’B ballads go, this ticks all the boxes and it’s certainly the equal of most.

There’s a definite change of style for “Buttons”, though. There’s a very Eastern style running through it, with a sort of sound that evokes memories of Holly Valance’s “Kiss Kiss”, only slowed down to mid-tempo. It’s got the very sassy and funky Black Eyed Peas sound in many parts as well and the vocals sound like a slightly weaker version of Fergie. The track is slightly less impressive than the previous higher tempo numbers, but the new influence makes it different enough to stand out and it’s an acceptable enough R’n’B influenced track.

No track called “I Don’t Need a Man” is going to be good for a man’s ego. That said, if you’re listening to an album with your ego, I don’t want to think about where you’ve shoved your headphones! This is perhaps the most pop influenced track on the album so far and the R’n’B edge is very much in the background. This could easily be a Christina Aguilera track, especially from her earlier albums, and there’s also a retro dance feel that takes me back to early 1990s dance music, like En Vogue’s early work. As someone who has always preferred the old style dance music to modern R’n’B, possibly due to when my teenage years occurred, this is easily my favourite track on the album.

The album takes a definite downwards turn at this point. The next track “Hot Stuff” is a cover of the great Donna Summer disco hit, also featured in “The Full Monty”. It’s a classic disco hit, but sadly, it’s unrecognisable here, with the intro being more akin to a 1980s style electro-pop song and the parts of the original which have been retained, such as the chorus, being a limp copy of the original, with some very Christina Aguilera style vocals. It would have been nice to have seen how they coped with a straight cover of the song, but whilst you have to admire the bravery of changing such a great tune and putting their own style on it, it just doesn’t work for me.

It’s time to get all laid back again with “How Many Times, How Many Lies”. There’s again a strong pop influence over a fairly standard R’n’B track, which could have been recorded by any current artist. It does have more of a 1990s feel than a modern one, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

After the travesty of a cover version that was “Hot Stuff”, I was concerned that “Bite the Dust” might be a version of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”. Fortunately, this wasn’t to be the case, with this instead being another up-tempo modern R’n’B number, which definitely hints towards Destiny’s Child, but with slightly less of a pop influence.

“Right Now” is a strange track to be having in the midst of all this R’n’B, as it sounds more like a stage show number. The chorus sounds a little like they’re about to break into “Hard Knock Life”, whilst the verses sound a lot like they should be in “Chicago”, with a big band, almost jazzy feel. It’s quite a catchy upbeat track, but it doesn’t quite fit in with anything else. Whilst this does make it distinctive, it does interrupt the album’s flow a little.

This seems like a bad thing, but for most of the next track, I kept wishing the album would be interrupted. “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go” is precisely what the title makes it sound like – another cover version. The vocals aren’t too bad, but the “Tainted Love” part of the song sounds like a combination of every other version of the song so far, with a vocal that is trying to emulate Marc Almond’s, but with an electro-techno backing that owes more to the Marilyn Manson cover. The “Where Did Our Love Go” section this segues into is fairly true to the original, but it’s only a verse or two and this one suffers from the same problem as “Hot Stuff” did, in that it’s a weak version of the Supremes original, which doesn’t even try to be any different. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t try to mix the two songs together, instead keeping them as two separate entities, but I’m too stunned by the dreadfulness of this version of “Tainted Love” to be grateful about anything, apart from the end of it.

Surely “Feeling Good” couldn’t be yet another cover? This was my hope, but it remained unfulfilled, as that’s entirely what the song was. It’s been given a slightly more cocktail hour feel than the original which, like “Right Now”, doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the album. The vocals have quite a jazzy, smoky feel to them, but don’t sound as good as on the rest of the album. This is by far the better of the cover versions on the album thus far, but the competition wasn’t all that strong and some very strange vocal stylings in parts mean this isn’t really a classic version of a classic song.

The cover versions keep coming with “Sway”. Apart from the female vocals, this is fairly true to the original, with the mambo beat and the Latin sound. There are a few bits where they try to inject an original touch or two to the vocals, which isn’t a wise idea, but it’s a nice up-tempo Latin number.

“Flirt” does at least seem to be an original track, but it comes at the cost of a huge shock. This is a guitar led track and it’s got a very rock-pop edge, with almost no hint of the earlier R’n’B sound, although some of the vocals do lean that way sometimes. But this track is very much reminiscent of some of Pink’s harder edged material than any R’n’B song, although the vocals again sound like Christina Aguilera in more than one place.

The album closes with “We Went As Far As We Felt Like Going”, which heads back toward a more familiar sound, although it doesn’t make it all the way there, perhaps only going as far as they felt like going? This is really more of a pop track with a vague hint towards R’n’B, but as my personal preferences tend to be more in that direction, that suits me fine.

In terms of quality, the album is very up and down. Strangely, instead of a group that has to use cover versions to improve an album as their own material isn’t strong enough to carry it, the opposite is true with “PCD”, as it is the cover versions that come closest to letting the album down. Fortunately, these tracks are in the minority, despite there being several of them and within an album that plays for 15 tracks and for 54 minutes, there is more than enough decent tracks to make up for the odd aberration.

The length of the album means that it comes as pretty good value, although with it now starting to age, there are cheap versions available. Prices such as £1.00 from eBay could make you kick yourself if you paid £8.99 on CD Wow or Amazon.

This isn’t my preferred kind of music, so I wasn’t expecting much from this album. That’s possibly the best way to come at it, as I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. Sure, there were some dodgy moments but generally I did enjoy the album. Admittedly, it’s not the ideal album for home listening, as it’s more of a club sound, but that could make it perfect “getting ready” music before a night out.

In many ways, The Pussycat Dolls are the R’n’B equivalent of Girls Aloud. They’ve been chosen to be in the group and they’ve been handed a bunch of songs to sing. In both cases, the music was very much with the times, with Girls Aloud’s debut album being mostly heavy pop, which was a major sound at that stage, and this being predominantly R’n’B, which is popular now. In the case of both groups, I enjoyed what they put out a lot more than I ever expected to. And, as with Girls Aloud, with the sound being so contemporary it will date fairly quickly and will be at best charmingly retro in a few years from now.

For the time being, however, this is a perfect slice of today’s music. So if you’ve heard any of the singles and enjoyed them, it’s worth picking up the album as you’ll get a lot more of the same and a few other things as well. If you’re into the R’n’B scene generally and don’t mind it with a touch of pop to go with it, then this could be worth taking a chance on if you can find it cheaply. Or if you’re just after something to get you picked up and in the mood for a night’s clubbing, it would be pretty good for that as well. Just don’t expect too much and you’ll find an album that at least meets your expectations.

Summary: Debut album from America's hottest girl group.