Lickin’ On Both sides

Mis-teeq are desperate to be Britain’s answer to Destiny’s Child. Unfortunately Sabrina, Alesha and Su-Elise lack the mighty vocal prowess of Beyoncé and Co., while any attempt to be the ‘answer’ to anything is bound to suffer in the originality stakes.

Mis-teeq attempt to counter this by incorporating some homegrown expertise. A plethora of UK garage allstars are involved in production duties, including UK Garage MC, Stargate and So Solid Crew.

‘They’ll Never Know’ featuring So Solid Crew members Asher D and Harvey is a potentially strong collection of the unexpected – a blitz of raps, hooks and kitchen sinks dropped from the heavens, but the end product doesn’t quite hang together as well as it might.

‘Stamp Reject’ opens promisingly with a blast of shouts and strings but turns into an insipid track about getting rid of Mr Wrong, leavened with a pinch of Missy Elliot mischief in the break. They also try to genre-jump with the acoustic guitar ballad ‘These Days’ which just happens to borrow heavily from Gabrielle’s ‘Dreams, and the Destiny’s wannabe thing is blatantly apparent in ‘Nasty’, another identikit picture of the kind of girl all these classy ladies don’t approve of.

Mis-teeq are not bad singers and their two-step stampedes like ‘Why’ and ‘One Night Stand’ are decent enough dance tracks. But as the girls say themselves, ‘I ain’t sipping if it ain’t Kristal’