Looking through the comments on youtube videos
of old Gossip songs is an uncomfortable exposé on how they hit the big-time in
2006. In amongst all the “you go girl”‘s and tiffs over the sex appeal of larger-than-life
women, it doesn’t seem like anyone has anything to say about their music. Back then Beth Ditto may indeed
have been a conversation starter, rivalling Adele as the epitome of the anti-model,
defiantly baring her gargantuan buttocks in the direction of the twig-thin catwalkers of the glossy magazine rack, but once you
stripped them of alternative fashion icon status, Gossip always seemed to be a
little short of things to say.
For a band whose attitude has so completely defined their career to
date, ditching riot grrl snarl to go boogie under the waning light of an
irrelevant, deflated disco ball is nothing short of suicidal. But, by Jove, they’ve
gone and done it anyway.
Rick Rubin’s swollen production on ‘Music For Men’ can be blamed for
squeezing out the last of Gossip’s already dubious garage-punk credibility, and
so it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that with the recruiting of Brian
Higgins (Pet Shop Boys, Sugarbabes) for ‘A Joyful Noise’, their sound has yet
again been pushed in an awkward direction. Ditto’s sugar sweet Madonna
impersonation, the embarrassingly dated synth sounds and a nauseating flood of
boring pop slogans (‘the beat goes on’, ‘it’s now or never’) speak all too much
of Higgin’s previous projects, and very little about a band in control of their
own destiny. Let’s hope this is the last we’ll hear from them.
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