[Album Review] The Saturdays - On Your Radar

Every band worth their salt has that ‘magic moment’ when they hit their stride. When everything goes right for them. On Your Radar – the Saturdays’ forth (or third, depending on your point of view) album is their magic moment. Notorious, All Fired Up and My Heart Takes Over represent the strongest trilogy of pop singles you’ll hear this year and if that wasn’t enough, the album features a couple of straight-up all-out dancefloor stormers easily just as good.

Get Ready Get Set and Move On U – this duo of club-rocking energy and alco-pop drenched goodtimes are The Saturdays operating at their very best. Move On U in particular is the kind of sci-fi electro banger that pop fanatics’ wildest dreams are made of; accelerating to a frenetic Euro-influenced chorus, it’s the sound of the mythic everlasting night out. Add in the fist-pumping feistyness of Get Ready Get Set and you’re onto a winner. Faster rounds off the hyper-uptempo tracks with a neon-illuminated trancey chorus.

I’ve long been the first to say that I’d love the girls to do another Forever Is Over-esque track; to really get the guitars out again. The Way You Watch Me does so, but channels it in a far more light-hearted, New Wave-tinged way. In the process it actually ends up with the Sats sounding the most like Girls Aloud they ever have (with the exception of the rap interlude). In a post ‘Higher feat. Flo-Rida’ world, it was only to be expected that another Sats + rapper combo would crop up soon. To be honest, Travie McCoy makes a pretty passable effort and it helps add another dimension to the album. These pop/urban blends are the inescapable sound of ‘now’ at the moment, and it’s only fair that The Saturdays grab a piece of a pie.

Do What You Want With Me goes for a massive-sounding explosion of EpicDubstep – taking the skyscraper choruses of past Sats successes like Here Standing and lashes these into the mix with screwdriver synths. Along with For Myself and Promise Me (the dub-step is out again on this one), these songs form the meat of the album – by no means highlights, but prime examples of the now well established ‘classic Sats sound’ the group begun to create on Wordshaker. Four albums in and the group have undoubtedly found their feet, their place in the pop market; the confidence and solidity that affords them shows in tracks like these.

The Saturdays have never sounded as streamlined as they do here. The tracks are bigger, bolder and precision packed with hooks so big they’re positively bursting. Chanty vocals are a logical companion to the band’s forthcoming arena tour – a larger sound for larger venues. Despite this progression, it’s nice to know the girls haven’t forgotten their origins either – slower tracks like Wish I Didn’t Know are pure Chasing Lights-era, a return to the glossy, clean, charming-mannered sounds of that record’s brilliant title track.

Last Call deserves a shout out too – it’s by far the best ‘proper’ ballad the band have put their name to. The melody is spot-on and you can bet a tenner on the fact that if this was on the Adele album it would have been Number One for weeks. As it stands, it’s a shimmering, gorgeous bit of pop at its most heartbreaking. I’ll definitely be in tears when the girls perform this one on tour, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one.