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The Pipettes bring on the pop

By CHARLES TAYLOR | November 28, 2006

FANS: The Pipettes sound as if they didn’t give a damn about being liked, but make ridiculously catchy pop.

Whether or not the Pipettes ever make good on the flabbergasting confidence and effrontery of their debut, We Are the Pipettes (an import on Memphis Industries), they’ve already earned themselves a dissident footnote in the history of girl-group pop. On first glance, in their party dresses and elbow-length gloves, and with their cutesy names (Riot Becki, Gwenno, Rosay), they look like a savvy version of manufactured Britpop — a more consciously retro Bananarama. But whereas those new-wave mascots worked overtime at being fey and cute, the Pipettes sound as if they didn’t give a damn about being liked, even as they go at making ridiculously catchy pop.

What’s going on here is nothing less than an attempt to subvert not just the romantic clichés but the romantic sensibility of pop from within. The band claim to want to recapture something like the (wall of) sound Phil Spector got with the Ronettes and the Crystals. But their sensibility might be derived from the lines Elvis Costello used to kick off “This Year’s Model”: “I don’t wanna kiss you/I don’t wanna touch.” The album maintains a hard, steadfast reserve typified by lines like the ebullient “Your kisses are wasted on me” or the song “Because It’s Not Love (But It’s Still a Feeling).”

Like many pop songs, “Because It’s Not Love (But It’s Still a Feeling)” begins on the dance floor with the singer admitting to the joy of feeling, swept up in the music and movement. But she’s not so swept up that she confuses that feeling with love. And she’s not quite ready to fall into the arms of her partner. As if to take revenge for every female naïf from “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” to “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” “One Night Stand” exults in telling a Don Juan that this encounter is nothing but sex, and it turns the tables on every “Why do stars fall down from the sky?” pop lyric with the mocking “Baby did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” The best lines in an album of dry-ice weenie shrinkers may be the tossed-off “Lacking in imagination/He said hello.”

Which is not to suggest that the Pipettes show contempt for the pop forms they are aping or indulge in anything as simple-minded as pomo irony. These girls are fans, and you hear that in the Del Shannon guitar that opens “Why Did You Stay?”, the strings that sweeten “Tell Me What You Want,” the cheerleader chants of the title track and “Your Kisses Are Wasted.” Most of all you hear it in the petulance of “It Hurts To See You Dance So Well,” an almost perfect pop song, in which the singer sees her boyfriend strutting his stuff for other girls.

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