Last week, kept off #1 in the UK by Flo Rida. This week, kept off #2 in the UK by Flo Rida…

[Video][MySpace]
[5.60]

Dave Moore: Charity single seems to think that it’s doing some kind of commentary on the idea of a plastic-fantastic girl group covering Depeche Mode, but the Saturdays learn the hard way that you can’t really “satirize” boring.
[4]

Jessica Popper: When I heard that they were going to cover this, for some reason I imagined it would be in a sultry electro-girl style. Instead, they’ve transformed the iconic track into a bouncy, cheery pop song perfect for Comic Relief. Kids who don’t know the original will especially love it. It’s a very enjoyable cover (best bit is when it sounds like “Rhythm of My Life” by Gina G at 2:28), but I still have to take issue with the video. Is it really necessary for these pretty young girls to dress and act so slutty in it?
[9]

Martin Kavka: Whereas Depeche Mode found the heart in stereotypically icy synthesizers, The Saturdays find ice in these romantic lyrics by pairing them with a video in which they play ‘50s housewives, having fun doing laundry, lying on cars, playing ukeleles, and throwing off clothes to make themselves weigh less. If this is comedy, please put it out of its misery. It’s almost impossible to screw this song up, but they come damn close.
[4]

Doug Robertson: Somehow The Satudays manage to take Depeche Mode’s most chart friendly moment, a genuinely euphoric surge of loved up synthy genius, and suck most of its poppy charms out of it like some sort of thrill hoover. It’s not that it’s a bad cover as such, more that, rather than the spike-heeled, sassy take on the song you might expect from a girl band, this is more of a rubber wellied trudge through the source material with an underwhelming air of “Will this do?” hanging over the whole affair.
[6]

M. H. Lo: Having decided to cover one of synthpop’s most famous riffs — and faced with options like recreating it with strings (the Balanescu Quartet), or as faux-batucada (Nouvelle Vague) — the Saturdays opt to… do nothing. Well, maybe not nothing: in the third section of the song, at the 2:13 mark, the music drops out for a second, the better to give us that “boom!” moment when the beat kicks back in. But even if we pretend that this is the Saturdays’ doing, it’s still not very confidence-inspiring to find that the best thing about the latest record by Britain’s latest girl group is one second of silence.
[3]

Additional Ratings

Hillary Brown: [5]
Dan MacRae: [6]
Hazel Robinson: [6]
Martin Skidmore: [6]
Keane Tzong: [7]