ARTIST: the ting tings
GENRE: british indie pop rocks
WWW: thet​ingt​ings​.com
TRACK: [02] The Ting Tings — That’s Not My Name
SUMMARY: there are a few things you can always count on when it comes to the british — james bond, an unhealthy addic­tion to may­on­naise, and superior pop music sens­ib­il­ities. while everyone on this side of the atlantic are going ape­shit over tal­ent­less hacks like lady gaga (sorry, wearing stupid looking clothing doesn’t make you unique, ori­ginal, or a good musician/​artist) and t-​pain (awe­some, you use auto-​tune. has anyone actu­ally heard this guy really sing?), the british have actu­ally man­aged to main­tain their self-​respect (for the most part, anyway).

so now it’s been a couple weeks since their appear­ance on SNL (which was actu­ally pretty lackluster per­form­ance and really did not have the energy i expected from the gen­er­ally bouncey and hyper­kin­etic katie white), but they were finally able to gain some recog­ni­tion on this side of the pond (with a grammy nom­in­a­tion). while they were already hot stuff in their native bri­tain, we gen­er­ally tend to get things late over here. it’s hard to believe it’s almost been two years since they released their debut album, easily the most fun pop album released in 2008.

if you can remember that far back, you’ll know that they got a little bit over­shad­owed because nobody knew how much of a crackpot lily allen actu­ally was, and she was devel­oping a repu­ta­tion as being the biggest fucking idiot in the entire uni­verse, while kate nash was making a name for her­self, banging her pretty little fin­gers away on a piano, wailing away infec­tiously about ex-​boyfriends, so the ting tings lost a little bit of the spotlight.

but like kate nash and lily allen before her, katie white’s vocals had all those ador­able eng­lish inflec­tions that made her half-​chanting/​half-​sing-​songy voice so fun to listen to — not to men­tion the great instru­ment­a­tion and excel­lent pro­duc­tion of the music to accom­pany it.

oh, and i guess jules de mar­tino also deserves some credit. so yeah, good job man!

anyway, the ting tings should be drop­ping a new album (tent­at­ively named kunst — which sup­posedly means ‘art’ in german, but like any proper german word, sounds dirty as fuck) later this year. so here’s hoping it sounds as good as their debut!