| At this juncture, it's hard to pick up any new teenybop product without a degree of cynicism. But for a good two-thirds of its highly tuneful debut album, the Irish girl-group quartet B*Witched employs Celtic conventions and a pleasantly light touch that breathes a little life into a genre that's increasingly cookie-cuttering itself into vapidity. Part of the charm is that even on the more "serious" tunes, B*Witched doesn't try to stretch beyond its reach; when they shout "Grap your cap/ Grab your rulers/ Let's go!" there's no question what market they're shouting at, and the album never veers from serving that audience (which the group knows well, thanks to twins Edele and Keavy Lynch's older brother Shane, who's part of Irish pinup band Boyzone). The most compelling track may actually be the blink-and-you'll-miss-it album opener "Let's Go (The B*Witched Jig)," a sprightly combination of Celtic fiddle and hip-hop rhythm that serves notice there's some ambition at work here. It certainly opens the ears for fiddle-fueled confections such as "C'est La Vie," "Rev It Up," and "Rollercoaster," with their bouncy choruses and inoffensive come-hithers ("Got to let me in/ Let the fun begin"). But B*Witched's songs � the group shared co-writing credit with producer Ray Hedges and arranger Martin Brannigan � also freely, and disturbingly, mine pop history: "Rev It Up" kicks off with the Jackson 5's "The Love You Save" hook, "Rollercoaster's" bridge draws from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Freak Out" openly plagiarizes the guitar riff from "Venus" (save the royalties, ladies; the lawsuit will be filed any day). B*Witched does acquit itself well on some of the gentler songs, particularly "To You I Belong," the delicately constructed "Castles in the Air" and "Blame It on the Weatherman," the latter of which is a refreshingly nonvictimized paean to lost love. When the bottom drops out, however, it all goes � from the aforementioned "Freak Out" to the tepid girl power anthem "We Four Girls" to the lush but slight closing track, "Oh Mr. Postman." Still, there's much more than you'd expect here to recommend B*Witched over any number of their contemporaries (and that includes Britney Spears and 'N Sync), and here's hoping that if there's a next time, the group will be able to keep it going for an entire album. |