[review 2008: half-measures and quiet victories]

The length of a pop album is a tricky thing to get right. Usually you take two or three irresistable formulas for a song and repeat them over and over again to make an album, which introduces the major problem: not enough repetition and you’ve wasted the hitmaking potential of your formulas; too much repetition and you’ve worn out your welcome well before the end. By this measure, the Ting Tings overshot by about three songs.

The British duo may very well be the final result of an online music culture attacking and then merging with more traditional forms of music media. How else to explain some of the contradictions: a so-called indie pop band that sounds like CSS, was named the second best new artist of the year by Last.fm, and tells interviewers about their “mutual distrust of the industry,” but is also signed to Columbia and hit #1 on the UK album charts. I guess it’s not the first time the indie aesthetic has been appropriated or otherwise subsumed by more mainstream culture, but this time around the merger almost seems natural: the Ting Tings are too good to keep playing dingy clubs in obscurity, and yet interesting enough that you don’t immediately think of them as a polished corporate band.

We Started Nothing works two different formulas for most of the album: super-bratty, dancefloor-ready electropop (”Great DJ,” “Fruit Machine,” “Shut Up and Let Me Go”) and more traditional British indie pop, emphasis on the “pop” (”Traffic Light,” “Be The One”). With the sole exception of “Traffic Light,” which seems more like a sketch than a finished song, the first two thirds of the album fire on all cylinders. If We Started Nothing was a mini-album or a maxi-EP, it’d be one of the best releases of the year.

But then the Ting Tings overreached and tacked on a few songs that just don’t work, exposing some of the nuts and bolts of the aforementioned formulas. “We Walk” sounds a bit too much like chintzy pop from the 90s, and if “Shut Up and Let Me Go” is CSS done right, “Impacilla Carpisung” is CSS done horrifically wrong. The title track closes out the album on a slightly less sour note, but by this point all the songs anyone wanted to listen to have long past, and there’s not nearly enough of the same mischievous energy to keep people engaged. We Started Nothing is an album that’s better than any one-hit popstar wunderkind has any right to expect—but not exactly good enough to assure the Ting Tings of continued success once everyone’s figured out their schtick and moved on.