Galore - Dragonette

I'd never heard of Dragonette until September last year, when an online friend in the states blogged about how they were her new favourite group. She compared them to No Doubt (I can't remember if this was due to the style of music they produced or the fact they were a female-fronted band) and raved about how great they were. She'd linked to their myspace page so I'd popped across there to check out some of the songs and really liked them. Despite ...
...night, I bought the album on the strength of hearing a a couple of minutes of several of their songs.

When it arrived, I put it on my cd player and listened to it over and over that night. Within a couple of days, it was uploaded onto my Sony Walkman and that weekend while I was doing overtime it was on repeat constantly for seven hours in a row. Overkill? Perhaps? But I listened to nothing else for pretty much a month!

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I'd never heard of Dragonette until September last year, when an online friend in the states blogged about how they were her new favourite group. She compared them to No Doubt (I can't remember if this was due to the style of music they produced or the fact they were a female-fronted band) and raved about how great they were. She'd linked to their myspace page so I'd popped across there to check out some of the songs and really liked them. Despite have never heard any of their songs prior to that night, I bought the album on the strength of hearing a a couple of minutes of several of their songs.

When it arrived, I put it on my cd player and listened to it over and over that night. Within a couple of days, it was uploaded onto my Sony Walkman and that weekend while I was doing overtime it was on repeat constantly for seven hours in a row. Overkill? Perhaps? But I listened to nothing else for pretty much a month!

Obviously, I quite like it. In fact, it was my favourite album of 2008. Despite the fact it was out in 2007 . . .

Dragonette are a quartet who came over to Britain believing they would have more success there. Although apparently they ended up being more successful in their native Canada, which I suppose is somewhat ironic. Fronted by Martina Sorbara, the band was apparently formed out of an adulterous relationship between her and fellow band member Dan Kurtz. I'm not quite sure how that works exactly but the pair are now married (to one another!) anyway and the band are awesome!

TRACK LISTING

1. I Get Around
2. Competition
3. Take it Like a Man
4. True Believer
5. Another Day
6. Get Lucky
7. Jesus Doesn't Love Me
8. Black Limousine
9. Goldrush
10. You Please Me
11. Marvellous

Even if you haven't heard of the band, you may be exposed to them soon since at the moment their song "I Get Around" is featured on the latest Rimmel advert. Which I'm very happy about because, as Gabriella Cilmi and various other artists prove, getting your song into a commercial is a pretty good way of getting your music out there!

If you haven't heard it, "I Get Around" is probably one of the best songs on the album. A song about, erm, "getting around", featuring lyrics like "Here I come when I better go, I say yes when I ought to say no" and "you don't tell on me I won't tell on you, I get around"
It's bouncy, dance-driven electro-style pop at its best and is without a doubt the sort of song which would get me up dancing in a club. It certainly gets me dancing around my bedroom! It is unbelievably catchy and impossible not to sing along with - once you know the words, that is!

The next two tracks "Competition" and "Take It Like a Man" follow in a similar vein to the first. "Competition" is another particular favourite of mine and is apparently inspired by Sorbona and Kurtz's early relationship. Well, it IS about adultery, after all! Somehow the lyrics and music and the tone of Sorbora's voice makes the whole affair sound acceptable though!

The majority of the album's tracks are fairly fast paced or mid-tempo, but there is the odd slowie on there. As you know, I'm not generally a fan of the slower songs, but somehow the ones on "Galore" kept me hooked all the same. My particular favourite ballad-type song has to be "You Please Me", in which I feel the singer sounds slightly detached from the song (which fits well with the subject, which you will see in the next paragraph) and which boasts a chorus which is difficult not to sing along with.

The tone of the album is definitely extremely sex oriented, there is little doubt about it! From the promiscuity in "I Get Around", the adultery in "Competition", the tale of a hooker and a rich man in "Black Limousine (a jaunty track that sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Scissor Sisters "Lovers in the Backseat" . . . only better) and the concept of ex-sex in "You Please Me", little room is left to the imagination as to what each song's subject is dealing with. Even the odd-man-out on the album, the show-tune type song "Get Lucky" fits into the theme. Bouncy and old-school it may sound, but it is LITERALLY about getting lucky, with lines like "looks like this might be a quickie"!

The earlier comparison to No Doubt is probably the most accurate, and Sorbora does at times sound very like Gwen Stefani, and gives the impression of having a very similar attitude too. Except probably a bit dirtier! The type of music Dragonette produce IS also very similar but more electro-pop than No Doubt's. It is mainly upbeat and bouncy, and there is no song on there which I would say is bad. I can easily listen to it all the way through without skipping through tracks, which I feel is always a good way to judge if an album is up your street or not.

I would also recommend you check out their myspace page if you're thinking you might like this album - that way you will get to hear a couple of their songs upfront! Here's the link - http://www.myspace.com/dragonette

PRICE GUIDE
Amazon - 9.98 (excluding p & p)
Play - 9.99 (including p & p) 

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