The Veronicas' debut album The Secret Life of… isn't terrible. Cliché? Yes. Manufactured? You bet. Predictable? Absolutely. But atrocious? Not completely.
The Veronicas are 20-year-old Australian twins Lisa and Jessica Origliasso. The girls look and sound like the love children of Avril Levigne and Ashlee Simpson, complete with faux-punk outfits, too much eyeliner and a mediocre pop album.
The girls kick-off The Secret Life of… with "4ever," a frantically paced pure pop track. It's hardly surprising that Max Martin, the Swedish super-producer responsible for some of N'Sync's and Britney Spears' biggest hits, is also the brains behind this track. "4ever" is a fun, ridiculously catchy ballad. It's also a song that you'd never ever want your roommates to catch you listening to.
Unfortunately for The Veronicas, "4ever," the best song on the album, is also the only one they had no part in writing. The Veronicas co-wrote every other track on The Secret Life Of… When the songs are good, which in the cases of "When it All Falls Apart" and "Revolution" they are, they sound like something the girls surreptitiously lifted out of Kelly Clarkson's recycling bin. When they're bad, they're really bad, to the point of being shockingly ridiculous.
Example: "Secret," The Veronicas' story of unrequited and orientation-confused love. "You could write a million letters everyday confessing to me / That I am the girl of your dreams / But nobody ever asked me / I never looked at you that way / 'Cause I always thought you were gay."
No one is expecting lyrical genius from The Veronicas, but these and many other lyrics, such as "don't know where I parked my car … not to mention I drank too much / I'm feeling hung-over and out of touch," are so insipid that they take credibility away from this overproduced pop cliché of an album.
It doesn't help that the perky momentum that The Secret Life of… has going for it during the first four songs swan dives into a clunky, forgettable mess for the last two-thirds of the album. Tracks like the sickeningly sweet "I Could Get Used to This" and "Mother Mother," a whiny tale of teenage angst, are almost bad enough to erase the memories of the decent songs, which are very distant memories by the time the album is over.
There is little to say about the musical content of The Secret Life of…, because most of it is so overproduced and clichéd that it barely leaves an impression. There are a few fun beats, but they're nothing to get too excited about.
The twins' voices are fine. Listening to them sing isn't a chore, but, much like the music, there is nothing special about their vocals. They've been manufactured in the Avril and Ashlee realm of pop stars, and they don't seem to be aiming for anything more than this.
In the end, it doesn't matter who recorded this album because it would have come out sounding exactly the same if any of the reigning pop princesses had taken a stab at it — although Kelly Clarkson could probably have made more of it work, mostly because she's likable and her voice is better.
The Secret Life of… is a mostly average, pop/punk, paint by numbers album. A few of the songs are enjoyable pop frenzies, but most of them aren't. Listeners expecting more than average voices singing mostly average songs are setting themselves up for disappointment. Those wise enough not to expect much won't find themselves too under-whelmed by The Veronicas.
Rating: 2 out of 5
