Say what you will about Natalie and Nicole Appleton - and people do - they certainly don't believe in making life easy for you. Take this debut LP: nothing is as it seems.
The first thing you notice, if you go back far enough as a listener to female-fronted pop to remember Madonna's 'Ray Of Light' is that 'Everything's Eventual' sounds 'exactly' like it. Not quite reminiscent, or strikingly similar, but, really, this is call-the-lawyers facsimile territory. Production, song structure, even the voices - all bear an uncanny resemblance.
And - and this is where things start getting 'really' complicated - this unavoidable comparison actually makes you think less of 'both' records. The sisters' vocals are so expressionless they sound like guide tracks, and their overall weakness makes you think that, actually, maybe 'Ray Of Light' wasn't the five-star classic you thought it was at the time. So you put it on for a few moments, and no! It remains great. But still.
Maybe it's just that Natalie and Nicole don't really have anything much they want to communicate. What made 'Ray... ' such an absorbing treat wasn't just its form but its content. Here there's just a continuation of the sisters' almost perverse public/private dichotomy - two photogenic women, both attached to big-time rock stars, both desperate to become famous, yet both intensely prickly when questions in interviews stray at all into what might be termed their "personal lives".
So we get 'M.W.A.', a song about mumbo-jumbo mysticism, 'All Grown Up', seemingly about slightly kinky sex, and '5am', which sounds great, but is something of a mess. And, towering above them all, there's the title track, which appears to be a list of the things Nat and Nic get up to of an average day. "Let's go fly a kite on Primrose Hill", they recount. "Take advantage of the sunshine". "I walked into my house, saw a spider in the Bathtub / Then I screamed, then I ran, but he was as scared as I was". "My Adidas are getting rugged / Think I'll buy myself another pair". You've had more scintillating conversations with your auntie.
But...but...
But there's a point here, roughly at about 2:40 into 'Everything Eventually' - the moment, precisely, where the song goes into a bridge and they sing, "But I'm glad to be alive/Just glad to be alive" - where, really, you have to forgive them all of the above. (OK, maybe not "all". But most of it.) Because, ultimately, there are more important things than whether someone's ripped their sound and style wholesale from somewhere.
Suddenly, the refusal to give anything away suddenly starts to seem the only rational response to the sort of life people like the Appletons must lead. The lyrics that follow, about getting home, kissing your daughter, going to bed with your fella and listening to a Harry Potter book-on-tape (no, really) become actually quite - and I hesitate before typing this, but it is 'exactly' what I mean - moving.
So, we came to bury Appleton, not to praise them. But we couldn't, because, basically, this is a record with its heart in the right place. And that, to be sure, is no bad thing. Easy.
