I can't believe how poorly this album's US release is being mis-managed. The label is a damn fool for this.
!!!
At least DNA was more of an effort and had more stuff going on before the release( it was still messy though) and with this it just feels like "well it's close to release date and thats about it".
For years, pop music has needed another group to fill the Spice Girls-shaped hole in the marketplace. With their new album, "Salute" (Columbia), the British quartet Little Mix seems ready to fill those high-heeled shoes. Their radio-friendly dance hits like "Move" and "About the Boy" even feel like they came from the dawn of the new millennium. What sets them apart -- aside from Perrie Edwards' high-powered fiancé, Zayn Malik, from One Direction -- is the way they power through Rihanna-ready ballads such as "Towers" and "Good Enough" without losing their momentum. Little Mix really has hit on the right formula this time around.
LITTLE MIX
"Salute"
GRADE B
BOTTOM LINE A peppy, if predictable, pop collection.
Listening to the album like I'm hearing it for the first time. Nothing Feels Like You still slays. I really want it to be a single.
Quote:
By Mikael Wood
February 3, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
Little Mix touched down in the U.S. last year with surprising force, scoring the highest-ever chart debut for a British girl group's first album. (Sorry, Spice Girls.) But might success have come too soon for these alums of the U.K. "X Factor"? Where the women put across an up-for-anything spirit on their debut album, "DNA" — most memorably in the effervescent disco-funk jam "How Ya Doin'?" — here they sag under the weight of too many wind-swept piano ballads and booming productions seemingly modeled on Katy Perry's "Roar." You hear power in the music, but also the group's determination to hang onto it.
Flashes of the playful old Little Mix appear in the dubstep-laced "Move" and "Nothing Feels Like You," a bubbly dance track built on a percussive hand-clap groove. And "Competition" has a campy musical-theater quality that puts the group's new dramatic streak to good use. But more typical of "Salute" is the dreary "These Four Walls," about "the feeling that the end has come." What a buzz kill.
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Little Mix
"Salute"
(Syco/Columbia) One and a half stars