I’ve been going out with her for eleven years and I’m still little better at picking out clothes she’ll like. ‘Do you see anything here you think I should try on?’ ‘What about that?’ ‘You’re joking’ ‘I thought you liked pink.’ ‘It’s the wrong kind of pink.’
After hearing ‘Strawberrez’ I know what she means. Mis-Teeq’s new album is through-and-through pink, and lots of it the wrong kind. You can tell what’s happened from the title down. Lickin’ On Both Sides was a little naughty, a little street; Eye Candy is mere description — and I’ve racked my brain for some alternative meaning but the nasty mannequin cover isn’t giving me much option. As outside, so inside: Mis-Teeq have become Cliff to TLC’s Elvis. Alesha’s de-garagified Left-Eye MCing is so clammily convincing in spots that if pop flops she could surely make it as a medium. It’s competent, if that’s what you’re after.
In the middle you get a run of slow jams, peaking/depthing with the glutamate gloop of ‘Strawberrez’, which is memorable right from the opening lines about ‘candy raindrops’, because you can’t quite believe how over-the-top it is. Plucked acoustics, synthesized caresses, giggly falsetto trilling piano, birdsong — birdsong! — all drowning you in post-coital plush. When it switches into its coda — ‘I just want you to know that I need some more’, over and over — it hints at something darker, an engorged, desperate swoon, but it fades out in time to stay chainstore not Goblin Market. The wrong kind of pink — try the next rack.