Scouting For Girls
Everybody Wants To Be On TV

All you need to know about the London power-pop trio's second album is that you should stay as far away from it as possible.

Scouting for Girls are a band so radio-friendly that they make The Feeling sound like Norwegian death-metallers freshly ejected from the fiery bowels of Hell. The London trio enjoyed huge success with their self-titled debut album in 2007 - most notably due to its lead single 'She's So Lovely', a song either licensed to a multitude of TV ad agencies, or one that sounds like it was, so overplayed and irritatingly catchy it was.

The main problem with its follow-up, though, is not a lack of progression, but an actual regression of their power-pop purveyed on their debut. 'Everybody Wants to Be on TV' is an awful album for several reasons: bridging the gap between boybands and blokes with instruments, Roy Stride and co. manage to stumble into an embarrassing middle-ground that's not even cool enough to be deemed MOR.

'Famous' and 'On the Radio' may be two of the perkier tunes on offer here, yet they remain dull, overproduced and completely devoid of personality or originality, while 'Little Miss Naughty' actually uses AutoTune on its chorus, making the whole song even cheaper and tackier than it already is.

But wait! We haven't got to the lyrics sheet yet: "Forget Audrey Hepburn, forget Bette Davis / I want to be known just for being famous" and "Posh girls have good manners, but they go like the clappers / 'cos they never got to hang around with boys at school" are just two of the couplets presumably intended in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but come across as terrifyingly cringeworthy.

You could argue that Scouting for Girls are simply filling a gap in the market – but when there are bands making indie-pop music as genuinely brilliant as Two Door Cinema Club, for example, there really is no point to them whatsoever.

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