The Ting Tings

So, CSS lost a member recently? About time too – did anyone else notice there were six of them in the band? As The Ting Tings have set about proving, you only need two people to create electronic party soundtrack tunes. Any more is just superfluous. The appendix of the gig. Bez. Most of !!!. Three Hadouken!s.

You want two voices in harmony? Double-track. More drums? Loop them. A finale that melds together about 16 different song ideas including fuzz guitars and errant saxophones? Layer that shit. The sound of Amy Winehouse warbling over the top about four minutes in? Patch it in later. Technology has the power to make bloated bands redundant.

The Ting Tings have released three singles: ‘Fruit Machine’ (NME Track Of The Week), ‘Great DJ’ (NME Track Of The Week), and now ‘That’s Not My Name’ (NME Track Of The Week). They’ve done the triple. Now we’re not 100 per cent sure, but we think the last band to get three consecutive TOTWs was Ladytron. Which is interesting, because they too know the power of Korg over man.

Approximately 63 per cent of singles in Tracks are filed under “catchy”, “hyper-addictive” or “burrows into your brain”, but ‘That’s Not My Name’ takes catchiness to a whole new dimension of nagging insistence. Maybe it’s the Motown-esque drum stomp à la The Pipettes (without the Hermesetas-sweet coating and kitsch art school student dresses). Or the effortless soul of Katie’s exasperated chant. Or it could be the elastic-band bass pinging the song straight into the NME hippocampus, but something about this single surpasses all else, and will have us dribbling “that’s not my name” to doctors and family members in our last feeble moments.

Tim Chester