On a personal note, it needs to be said that I sat on The Ting Tings’ debut for a little over a week, listening to it repeatedly, trying to figure out what I liked about it and how I was going to review it. Then it occurred to me; at the dawn of the Eighties, punk bands discovered what fun it was to make people dance, and so groups like the Talking Heads and Blondie softened up and jumped into a mainstream obsessed with dancable beats—similar to the one dominating the popular consciousness again now. Blondie’s Parallel Lines was the pinnacle of this happening before everything devolved into new wave and “Heart Of Glass” invaded discotheques forever altering the fabrics of both punk and pop. I preface this review with that history lesson because, in listening to We Started Nothing, you can actually hear history repeating. While this album is The Ting Tings’ debut—they didn’t start out punk—the faded remains of the genre’s ethics and sound are omni-present in these ten songs.
Right from the first marching step of “Great DJ,” singer-guitarist Katie White and singer-drummer-multi-instrumentalist Jules De Martino craft an undertone of petulant dissent to a set of really good beats and run with the theory for the duration of the disc’s runtime. In songs like “That’s Not My Name” (which has already topped the UK singles chart), “Shut Up And Let Me Go” (also known as the driving force behind the new iPod advertising campaign), “Keep Your Head” and the closing title track, White arrives at a sort of bombastic ennui that’s equal parts Joan Jett and Debbie Harry but English and infectious all the way through.
There are elements of the songs that sound remarkably familiar too; the guitar part in “Shut Up And Let Me Go” sounds like it could have been sampled straight out of Blondie’s “Rapture,” and other little bits of beats and riffs bear similarities to things that came before, but all of that seems to serve the purpose of making the music accessible to anyone that finds it. That, in a nutshell, is the dictionary definition of both pop culture terrorism and it’s also what makes We Started Nothing so innately attractive and the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
It’s questionable how long the bubble will last for The Ting Tings and other bands for whom the media has forced massive instant exposure, but this band and this album are a little different. The subversive element in We Started Nothing is so deeply recessed, it’s virtually untraceable—but it is there. The place that this record may be leading is a very interesting one; We Started Nothing is lifestyle music on the surface—it’s dance-punk to sell designer denim and computer hardware—but if it catches on (some would say again), it may totally alter the nature of pop-aware lifestyles.
The Ting Tings – We Started Nothing is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
For more information visit www.thetingtings.com or myspace.com/thetingtings
