Tangled Up is availible to download of Itunes, and you ucan get each track seperatly INCLUDING 'CTS'!!

Tangled Up is availible to download of Itunes, and you ucan get each track seperatly INCLUDING 'CTS'!!

 

:cheer: thanks for posting! seems you can get it off 7Digital from the album too.

Ouch, not sure it's really clever marketing to let CTS being available alone... :o

 

The strategy was to not release CTS first in order to push people to buy the album if they really like the song.

Now if it's available to download seperately, that strategy is a bit over, and well, releasing CTS one week before wouldn't have changed a thing for the album, but would have improved the chance to get their 17th top10 hit...

Ouch, not sure it's really clever marketing to let CTS being available alone... :o

 

The strategy was to not release CTS first in order to push people to buy the album if they really like the song.

Now if it's available to download seperately, that strategy is a bit over, and well, releasing CTS one week before wouldn't have changed a thing for the album, but would have improved the chance to get their 17th top10 hit...

I wouldn't worry, im sure CTS will still fall within the top 10 next week, maybe top 5?? deserves to anyway!

i think people may buy still remembering the X Factor performance, and not everyone downloads ala me :lol:

 

And let's not forget the great fanbase :wub: that have contributed towards them 16 top 10 singles :cheer: *pat on back*

I've got my copy :D & I got the last copy of "Mixed Up" in my Woolworths (where they only had 2 copies :o - yet they have about 10 display cases for it :lol:).

 

Can't wait to listen to it :P

got my standard Tangled Up and Mixed Up too :cheer:

 

listening to Mixed Up now :wub:

Just bought Tangled Up :wub:

 

Might get Mixed Up later on in the week.

Overall, I'm not too sure about the album on first listen. Mixed reactions on this, there are some good pop tracks but some tracks which I find are like 'pop on speed' which to me isn't very nice on the ears.

I'm immediatley drawn to the launch singles for the project "Sexy! No No No..." and "Call the Shots". Another major attention grabber has to be "Girl Overboard" which needs to be a single! Other stand outs for me include "Control of the Knife", "Close to Love", "Fling" and "Black Jacks".

As much as I like 'dance'/'disco'-aloud tracks, there's just a few too many in here. I do think there needs to be something which gives the listener a break, I feel I need to be hyped up on sugar or something to keep up with its pace.

 

It's far better than their Debut (bar the singles from it), but it is nothing when it's put against "Chemistry" or "What Will the Neighbours Say?". Then again, the album could just be a huge grower for me (which the previous albums had to do to get my complete attention).

 

My Ratings:

 

1. Call the Shots (8/10)

2. Close to Love (7.5/10)

3. Sexy! No No No... (9/10)

4. Girl Overboard (10/10)

5. Can't Speak French (6.5/10)

6. Black Jacks (7/10)

7. Control of the Knife (7.5/10)

8. Fling (8/10)

9. What You Crying For (5.5/10)

10. I'm Falling (4/10)

11. Damn (5/10)

12. Crocodile Tears (5.5/10)

 

Overall: 7/10

 

For the casual, the...

Must Downloads:

Girl Overboard

Call the Shots

Sexy! No No No

Close to Love

Control of the Knife

Black Jacks

Fling

 

:D

Edited November 19, 200717 yr by JammerD

i love it

 

girl overboard has to be the next single!

 

also fling, blackjack, control of the knife, cant speak french are :wub:

WOWWWWW, i love it so much!

 

Fling just HAS to be a NUMBER ONE SINGLE!

 

I give the album 9.5/10 (because of the last two average songs)

Really love this now :wub: Girl Overboard and Control Of The Knife are amazing!

At first, i failed to see the love for "Control Of The Knife". But after at least 4 listens its IMMENSE :wub:

 

01. - Call The Shots - 9.5/10

02. - Close To Love - 9/10

03. - Sexy! No No No... - 7/10 - Why oh why? :( Intro is amazing though :wub:

04. - Girl Overboard - 9/10

05. - Cant Speak French - 10/10 :wub:

06. - Black Jacks - 8.5/10

07. - Control Of The Knife - 10/10 :wub:

08. - Fling - 8.5/10

09. - What You Crying For? - 7.5/10

10. - I'm Falling - 8.5/10

11. - Damn - 8/10 - Its grew ^_^

12. - Crocodile Tears - 8/10

 

Amazing album overall. Me loves :wub:

BBC

 

by Talia Kraines

16 November 2007

 

Adored by critics, fans and even the skinny jean brigade, the experimental "Sexy! No No no..." was our first introduction to the 4th Girls Aloud album. And we're really happy to report Tangled Up is yet another unrelenting pop masterpiece.

 

Managing to rid themselves of the tackiness of the likes of "I Think We're Alone Now", the understated "Call The Shots" is an unexpectedly calm opener. But don't get too worried, "Close To Love" really kicks off the energetic side of Tangled Up with a monster beat. Similarly the punishing 90s bassline of "Girl Overboard" and it's overwhelming chorus make it, like "Something Kinda Ooh", one of those songs we know is going to be amazing to dance to in a club. Sarah's influence is certainly felt on the futuristic "I'm Falling". Trapping squelchy sounds with a punky guitar, those of us who were horrified "Graffiti My Soul" was never a single will love it.

 

Instead of ballads, we're treated to mid-tempo fun courtesy of the sultry "I Can't Speak French" and the entrancing album closer "Crocodile Tears". And we never thought we'd name a slower song as one of our favourites, but the reggae infused "Control of the Knife" complete with an absurd mash of trumpets and synths has managed to steal our heart.

 

Undoubtedly the best girl band the UK has ever seen, Girls Aloud make challenging pop music without ever losing their sense of fun and Tangled Up is yet another diamond on their fingers.

 

 

 

Daily Star

 

GIRLS Aloud have produced a discotastic fifth opus that’ll be knocking the stuffing out of turkeys across the country this Christmas.

 

Playlist’s had an early butchers of Tangled Up due November 19 and here’s our lowdown.

 

 

Call The Shots: classy electronic Euro-pop with real edge.

 

Close To Love: “So close to love I can almost taste the kill,” drools Nadine on this driving Donna Summer-esque highlight. Guys with “terrible hair” are warned to “back off”.

 

Sexy! No No No...: First single but easily the weakest track.

 

Girls Overboard: Brilliant Euro-trash littered with gargantuan synths. Sounds like something Armenia put up for Eurovision in 1989.

 

Can’t Speak French: Swirling, slower cut with great jazzy guitar changes - “I can’t speak French so I’ll let the funky music do the talking.”

 

Black Jacks: Typically upfront Xenomania production. Sounds like a cross between Toni Basil’s Mickey and Surprise, a song off the new Sugababes album.

 

Control Of The Knife: Fast upbeat reggae pop. Sounds a wee bit forced.

 

Fling: Girls are back to their tongue-in-cheek best on this power rocker, croaking: “It’s just a fling baby, just a bit of dingaling baby.”

 

What You Crying For: Kimberley’s moment to shine on this two-step number.

 

I’m Falling: Cyber punk rocker with oodles of bass distortion.

 

Damn: Sounds more like an out-take from their last album. Bit naff.

 

Crocodile Tears: Quality ballad with a Hispanic twang. Surely a future James Bond theme tune.

 

 

Digital Spy

 

During their five-year assault on the pop charts, Girls Aloud have turned presumption-busting into an art form. Formed on Popstars: The Rivals - a forerunner of The X Factor that now seems hopelessly naïve and innocuous - nobody expected the ramshackle five-piece to last beyond their first album. But thanks to their brilliant run of genre-defying modern pop singles, not to mention their dogged refusal to conform to the media-trained blandness of most modern-day chart stars, they stand proud as the nation's most cherished pop group. Ken Livingstone took them to China as "cultural ambassadors"; the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand came out as fans; and David Cameron told Radio 1 that Cheryl Cole was his favourite group member. At this stage in the game, only the most wilfully miserable indie buffoon could deny a fondness for Girls Aloud.

 

However, this hard-earned respect has come at a price. For the first time in their careers, Girls Aloud are feeling the weight of expectation on their tanned, toned, exfoliated shoulders. Tangled Up, the group's fourth studio album and their first since 2005's Chemistry opus, will be regarded as a disappointment if it's not fun, frivolous, catchy, sexy and innovative. Thanks to the sterling efforts of Xenomania, the hit-making collective who've produced every one of the group's 16 hit singles, it succeeds on all counts.

 

While Sugababes, Britain's other great girl group, have recently equated maturity with retreating to mid-tempo and saving their dancing shoes for special occasions, Girls Aloud have thrown caution to the wind and done the exact opposite: Tangled Up is their most danceable album to date. The bolshy electro-rock of 'Fling' is surely the sound that fills Sarah Harding’s head on one of her infamously boozy nights out, while 'Girl Overboard', a slightly ridiculous rave knees up with a vodka rush of a chorus, pushes the group towards BPM overload. There's even a nod towards the Hoxton scene on 'I'm Falling', a thrilling mixture of Prodigy-style beats and intergalactic synths that comes on like a slightly less ear-splitting Hadouken!

 

Amidst all these transgressions on the dancefloor, Xenomania still find time to bend pop music into strange, exotic shapes. It shouldn't be possible to weld early noughties Gallic disco to souped-up ska-pop, but 'Control Of The Knife' manages just that, while ‘'Black Jacks' somehow recalls both the sixties psychedelia of 'This Wheel's On Fire' and the brief career of shouty popstrels Shampoo. Yes, really. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, the girls might wish they hadn't based their cartoon character rapping technique on Betty Boo, the nineties popstar with whom Cheryl Cole's recently been scrapping in the tabloids.

 

Mildly upsetting as it is, Tangled Up lets us know that Girls Aloud are growing up. (Well, Sarah Harding has just reached the ripe old age of – gasp! – 26.) Current single 'Call The Shots' tempers its eighties pop exuberance with a generous helping of melancholy, while the titter-filled 'Control Of The Knife' deals with a power struggle within a fledgling relationship. Its killer pay off line - "You're keeping me cold in the night… but honey you're starving!” – confirms what we've known all along: there's a spikiness behind the group's sweet exteriors. That said, their new-found maturity notwithstanding, Girls Aloud are still capable of playing the hussy: 'Close To Love' makes some not so-coy to references to "needing more wood", and 'Fling' finds the kinky quintet in full-on vamp mode. "Don't be getting soft on me," they holler. "Just give me something casually."

 

Ultimately Tangled Up comes off as a teasing insight into the relationship histories of five girls who've packed a lot of living into their 20-odd years. Girls Aloud are many things on this album – confident, sexy, vulnerable, persuasive, even a bit embarrassing at times – but, crucially, they always sound built to last. Let's call it another presumption busted, shall we?

 

 

4/5

Guardian

 

On Girls Aloud's official website, a fan recently asked Cheryl Cole if she had ever considered an alternative career. Apparently so. Had fate not intervened in the young Geordie's life, and transformed her into the kind of pop star that Viz comic might have invented - impossibly beautiful, implausibly foul-mouthed - she was all set to become an embalmer. "I would have liked to have put makeup on dead people," she said, "because when I went to see my granddad who had died, they did a really bad job on him and I was only 14 and that made me want to do a better job for other people." Pop music's gain, it seems, was the mortuary slab's loss.

 

Quotes like that offer a salutary reminder of Girls Aloud's uniqueness. The current singles chart rather belies the notion that pop is mouldering in its grave - half the Top 10 is composed of manufactured pop acts - but Girls Aloud remain a manufactured pop band like no other, and not merely because one of their number abandoned her teenage dreams of putting makeup on dead people in order to join up. They have attained a remarkable blanket approval. Only the cloth-eared and inoperably snobbish seem immune to their charms. Tiny children scream at them; OK! and Heat magazine pursue them; the Arctic Monkeys declared them "the best"; Franz Ferdinand have borrowed their production team, Xenomania, to work on their next album. Ken Livingstone apparently believed they could improve diplomatic relations between Britain and China, which even their most ardent fan might consider is investing Something Kinda Ooooh with powers slightly beyond its facility.

There is no talk of guilty pleasures or so-bad-it's-good about their records. Girls Aloud currently find themselves in a difficult position not because their fickle weenyboppers have deserted them, or adverse publicity has dented their image, but because they and Xenomania have to follow up 2005's Chemistry, a concept album about celebrity that set boggling new standards for daring in contemporary pop. It's a tough call, and Tangled Up's pre-emptive singles have augured ill. Sexy No No No is nothing if not bracing, but someone carelessly forgot to pack a tune amid the fuzzy guitars and synthesizers, distorted vocals and Sympathy for the Devil-esque whoops. By contrast, Call the Shots has a chorus that only anterograde amnesia could wipe from your brain, but its structure and production seem a bit commonplace coming from the people who made Biology, an audacious three-minute pop single on which the chorus didn't turn up for a full two minutes.

 

Thus Tangled Up begins disappointingly, with the sense that, having set the bar high, all concerned are now craning their necks to see the bar and wondering how it got up there in the first place. Girl Overboard and Close to Love's conjunction of rock guitar and thumping house beat seems familiar, and previous Girls Aloud albums have dealt in the un- expected. Enter Can't Speak French, a prime example of Xenomania's ability to throw wildly disparate musical elements together, an ability they seem to reserve for Girls Aloud, possibly because it fits so perfectly with Cole and co: these ideas shouldn't work but they do, just like the notion of a reality TV-birthed band making thrilling and ground-breaking albums. Here, you get a peculiar, loping rhythm that can't decide whether it's swing shuffle or glitter stomp, topped off with an ungainly synthesised bassline and intricate jazzy guitar. As ever, you get the distinct impression that lyricist Miranda Cooper may require surgery to get her tongue out of her cheek: "I'll let the funky music do the talking," runs the chorus, over a beat that couldn't be more cumbersome and unfunky if it tried.

 

From then on, Tangled Up is a riot. The melodies are uniformly fantastic and there's something relentless about the way it pelts you with audacious creativity and improbable juxtapositions: Black Jack's cocktail of glorious Northern soul-inspired chorus and belligerent terrace chant ("come and get stuck in!"); What You Crying For's unlikely debt to techstep drum'n'bass; the clattering rave breakbeat and sampled scrape of fingers down guitar fretboard that powers I'm Falling. Fling - on which a Girl Aloud divertingly announces her Chuck Berry-esque desire for "a bit of ding-a-ling" - offers a kind of nuclear-powered punk-funk that leaves virtually every NME-sponsored early 80s revivalist looking hopelessly pallid.

 

You're left pondering an album that by any standards seems pretty irresistible. It's witty, diverse, experimental and viscerally thrilling: what more do you want pop music to be? Frankly, the sort of person who claims they find nothing to love here is like the sort of person who claims to hate the Beatles: they're either posturing or they're an idiot. Either way, you should pay them no mind.

 

 

 

 

 

NME

 

Breakbeat symphonies, new rave ballads, clubbing nightmares - yes, Girls Aloud's career has been marked by genre-hopping, and lots and lots of fake tan. The magic dust they sprinkled on the Top 40 has now fallen into the fabric of music and 'Tangled Up' will continue the trend. Highlights 'Fling' and 'Can't Speak French' are unbeatable future pop hits

 

7/10

Popjustice

 

1. This is the sleeve for the promo -->

 

2. 'Girl Overboard' is a massive Euro rave-up extravaganza and should be a single unless there is a tragic event involving a girl falling off a boat or maybe if there is some sort of real-life version of the hilarious Goldie Hawn film 'Overboard' in which Goldie Hawn actually died instead of just amusingly lost her memory because then Radio One wouldn't play it due to 'concerns over the public mood etc'.

 

3. Every time it's been on in the office 'Sexy! No No No...' has been mercilessly skipped and after we'd finished listening to it the first time there was literally an argument over which song we'd listen to again first.

 

4. 'Fling' is sort of like 'Wake Me Up' from the year 2012.

 

5. There are NO BALLADS and NO COVERS.

 

6. "I can't speak French, so I let the funky music do the talking, talking now." That is a good lyric.

 

7. We've listened to it 180 times and it's only been in the office since 9am.

 

8. It's the best Girls Aloud album of all time and is better than the Sugababes, Kylie and Britney albums although we've just done a review for someone giving the Britney album 5/5 so we suppose that probably makes 'Tangled Up' a 6/5 album. Which our calculator tells us is 1.2. Which is 120%. "They've really given it 120%" etc etc.

 

9. It's out at some point in November and would make the ideal Christmas present for someone who likes amazing pop music.

 

10. There you go.

 

6/5

stv.tv

 

By Oliver Gaywood

 

Recently, I received the best parcel of my stv career. Inside was a copy of Girls Aloud's fourth studio album, Tangled Up. Although the first two singles haven't set my ears alight, there's always something special hidden in a GA album that made me extremely excited – for anyone who hasn't heard You Freak Me Out, Wild Horses or, most importantly, Graffiti My Soul get yourself down to iTunes now.

 

Call The Shots comes up first but I don't want to listen to that right now so it's straight on to the new stuff, Close To Love, which is the real opener of the album. Hectic and fast paced, it seems Xenomania have opted to go with the Something Kinda Ooooh style for this album which is an amazing idea. Sexy! No No No… had already hinted at this and Girl Overboard, although more melodic, does nothing to try to persuade me otherwise, keeping the same style as high-tempo electro pop rules supreme.

 

It's not until the bass-heavy Can't Speak French, with the sizzling line of “I can't speak French so I let the funky music do the talking, talking”, that something different happens, something special happens. Rather than the futuristic sound often associated with Girls Aloud, this comes across more like an updated Bananarama track (when the band were at their peak in the 80s rather than the recent shambles of a reunion).

 

Round about now would be a good time to remind everyone that this album has no covers (none, zero, nil, nada) and after past attempts – such as the bland version of Girls On Film (Duran Duran), the dreary Deadlines and Diets (Moonbaby), or the worst-song-ever-recorded-by-Girls-Aloud-and-that's-including- All-I-Need-(All-I-Don't) See The Day (Dee C. Lee) – this can only be regarded as a positive thing. Also, there's nothing that can be regarded as a proper ballad which means there's no need to skip through anything slow as you play Tangled Up to get you geared up for a night out.

 

Although Can't Speak French is definitely up there, the stand out track on first listen appears to be Damn (“She said ‘Damn! I lost my number and I lost my head, baby.'”) which is nothing more than three minutes forty-five of outstanding pop.

 

At the moment, I'd say Tangled Up is better than Chemistry but not up to the standard of What Will The Neighbours Say?.

 

If a new band had come out with an album of this quality I would be raving about it, but because of Girls Aloud's brilliance in the past I expect nothing but the best from them. Paul Gallagher's going to give this album a proper review sometime soon and if he gives it any less than 12 stars he's a fool.

 

Also...

 

If you're looking for a ballad along the lines of I'll Stand By You or Forever And A Night , there's nothing on here like that. Black Jacks starts a bit like a ballad, but its chorus picks up and when they start screaming “New York nothing, come and get stuck in, won't you come rocking?” it all gets a bit too mental to be a ballad. If you came into a room where someone was listening to this after about a minute of the track you'd never call it a ballad.

 

Fling (“Nothing more than a fling, baby, fling, baby. A bit of ding-a-ling, baby, bling, baby”) can be a bit hit or miss (think Money ) but it'll be mindblowing played full blast / in a club.

 

Crocodile Tears , which is about the same tempo as Call The Shots , is probably my least favourite on the album.

 

I'm Falling ("When I was young I wanted to be a punk rocker, but they said 'No!'") is the Sarah-friendly track whilst Control The Knife has the same sort of vibe as Watch Me Go and makes use of Sexy! No No No… 's vocoder.

 

Lyrically, Close To Love is sublime. If you're wondering, this is the song that the album takes its title from.