The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

Genre dance Publisher Columbia External Links The Ting Tings Website The Ting Tings MySpace

 The Ting Tings’ idiotic and ill-spirited debut, We Started Nothing, released stateside this June 3 on Columbia records, is a forgettable album.

Or at least I hope it is, since I can’t wait to forget it.  At present, certain dopey blurts of Casio synthesizer, and a series of horrible squawks —“ee ee ee ee, ee ee ee ee,” sung by Katie White with a joylessness that doesn’t seem to suit the phrase—are still stuck in my head.  These too, like the old hot dogs encamped in my bowels, will pass.  In the meantime I pray that the title of this record has the wisdom and honesty that everything else about it lacks, and that this Manchester, UK duo—singer/guitarist White, and drummer/keyboardist/producer Jules de Martino—have started nothing, and that they will wait a while before they try to start anything else.

  The Ting Tings’ Wikipedia entry informs curious visitors that their music belongs to the genre of “dance punk.”  Now, in most cases I’m inclined to think that such slapped-together genre names obscure more than they reveal.  It can only cheapen my appreciation of the Arcade Fire, for instance, to think of them as “chamber pop.”  Here, however, the label is a fitting and evocative one.  “Dance punk” sounds like guaranteed disaster, and that is what this album is, from one end to the other.  (Well, then: dance punk.  Maybe the Ting Tings started that.)

 It requires some charity even to think of We Started Nothing as an album at all.  Really, it’s a grab-bag, an incoherent potluck—not a proper album, so much as ten chunks of digital information that you can buy at the same time if you want.  What few elements the individual tracks have consistently in common, the themes or trademarks of the Ting Tings’ music—notably: grim petulance, awful metaphors, blunt and clunking rhymes fit for a children’s handclap game, and unvaried rhythm—aren’t exactly welcome.  The awful metaphors—unlike those of, say, Kilroy Was Here—don’t even bother to agree with each other.  “You keep playing me like a fruit machine,” White whines on one track, and then whines “Don’t you be a traffic light” on the next.

One of these has to go, right?  If I were a traffic light, would I play White like a fruit machine?  This is an argument that I’m not going to win.  You can’t reason with Katie White.  As a singer she takes on the invincible airs of a vaguely aggrieved fourteen-year-old who pouts in the back seat of the station wagon while in her mind she shows the world who’s boss.  (“Put us in the corner ‘cause we’re into ideas,” she barked at me, and I thought: take any corner you like, and stay there.)  Beset on all sides by maleficent pronouns—“Nothing was the same again,” and “This hurts”—she contents herself with striking postures of indeterminate sass while, thanks to us squares, “it all goes wrong.”

A message to Columbia Records: I know something is happening here, but I don’t know what it is.