Album Review: The Saturdays – Living For The Weekend

The UK’s supergroup The Saturdays are back with their latest album, Living For The Weekend. The group have been keeping the album’s name a secret and was only revealed last month on the 4th of September.  With their first single 30 Days released all the way back in May 2012, The Saturday’s latest album has definitely been a long-time coming.

2013 has been a big year for the London based and formed girl group. They’ve launched their second single What About Us worldwide and are even starring in their own reality tv show Chasing The Saturdays. Currently under the record labels Polydor and Fascination for UK releases, the girls have now also signed on to Island Def Jam and Mercury Records for their new US market.

Living For The Weekend is a solid pop album, just like the rest of The Saturdays’ work. Defining a sound is every musician’s struggle, but sometimes the same tune over and over again can be redundant. With 1.3 million likes on Facebook, eleven Top 10 singles on the UK Charts and 3 previous successful studio albums, it seems like The Saturdays are still the same fun loving girl-group. But is the same act any good after its 4th run?

The opening track What About Us featuring Sean Paul is a normal modern pop song. The song includes the typical ‘na-na-na’ and synth/vocals duet in the chorus. The beat is simple, the auto-tune is overused and the lyrics speak of the most common topic in any song in history ever: love. It’s success is in the fact that it ticks all the technical boxes of what’s in a pop song, but it offers nothing new. If this was the only track in the album that does it, then all would be forgiven, but unfortunately that is not the case. If the song doesn’t follow the generic pop-song formula, it adds rapping, with What About Us and Gentlemen falling victim to the technique.

Every single song in this album is about a romantic pursuit, one way or another. The title of the album sets up the idea that this will be an album about having fun during a time where it’s all play and no work, but it might as well have been called Living For Love. This is a 12-track album and not one song is about having a girls only weekend, or enjoying some time away from everything. There’s only one thing on these girls minds, and that is not the weekend.

And then there’s the track Anywhere With You. If you listen closely the chorus it’s almost identical to Katy Perry’s hit song California Girls. Pop music is such a massive genre and while there are key elements shared amongst all types of songs, there’s too much of a similarity in the melodic line of the vocals and Perry’s song to be ignored. It’s starting to become a trend to fuse songs together that sound alike to Toxic by Britney Spears layered with Adele’s Rolling In The Deep to Wonderwall by Oasis with Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day that there’s bound to be a mash up of The Saturdays and Katy Perry’s songs in the near future.

The only track that really grabbed my attention was You Don’t Have A Right. The piece is mostly acoustic with a piano accompaniment. As the song develops there’s some subtle beats and strings. By stripping the song to almost a bare minimum a strong passion burns throughout. This is a side of The Saturdays I’d love to hear more of. The girls have beautiful voices that get stuck in all the digital noise used in their songs.

There are definitely strengths and weaknesses in The Saturdays’ Living For The Weekend. If you’re not looking for anything new and just love the solid girl-group sound then you will enjoy this album. The girls are sure to uphold their fanbase and attract many more followers due to this album, but their next album really needs to step it up a notch and ditch the 90s girl-group act if they still want to be relevant in the future.

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Stephanie Ochona