PopSyndicate.com

Too many cooks in the kitchen, and not nearly enough sass.

How humbling must it have been for Nicole Scherzinger to come crawling back to the Pussycat Dolls after realizing her solo career would be going nowhere? One can’t blame her for trying, of course. The Pussycat Dolls were a hit from day one, and as the group’s frontwoman, she was afforded several opportunities to shine via collaborations with everyone from Diddy to Timbaland. Easier still to buy into one’s own hype when the rest of the members of the Pussycat Dolls are little more than glorified backup dancers. Even with one member dropped from the line-up, I still can’t remember all of their names! Does Nicole even know them, or are they all written on the palm of her hand during interviews?

Certainly not without its strengths, Doll Domination begins admirably enough with the bouncy, almost tongue-in-cheek ‘Candlyland’ aesthetic of “When I Grow up”. The song seems to revel in its inherent silliness, straddling the line between being infectiously catchy and gratingly annoying. One of the standouts, however, has to be “Takin’ Over The World”. The simplicity of the production by Chase N Cashe works to the group’s advantage, scaling back on the bombast of contributors like Rodney Jerkins and Timbaland. The whole middle-eastern vibe mixed with some well-placed guitar riffs complement Scherzinger’s sultry vocals. “Magic”, meanwhile, is a near-perfect dance track that only suffers slightly from Timbaland’s tiresome pop-beatboxing. Thankfully, Timbo makes up for it with the 60s doo-wop-inspired “In Person”.

It’s a shame the rest of the album is such a mess. Most of the songs range from average to downright horrible. One of the more embarrassing offerings is “Bottle Pop”. The title is bad enough without at being monotonously chanted throughout the chorus, and Snopp Dogg’s sluggish rap verse. Meanwhile, “Out of This Club” is too reminiscent of Usher’s “Love In This Club”, a song that wasn’t all that great to begin with. “Halo” might have been a serviceable ballad, but the techno-pop production is just too overbearing. You’ve also got songs like “Happily Never After”, written and produced by Ne-Yo. Listening to it, you almost get the impression that it was meant for him to perform, as Scherzinger just can’t seem to do anything to make it her own.

The problem with Doll Domination is that as a whole album, it’s all over the map. Multiple producers and writers on pop albums is nothing new, but in this case, all it does is accentuate how much of a novelty the Pussycat Dolls are as a group. With little creative force within the group (Scherzinger has songwriting credit of three of the album’s sixteen songs), the puppet masters behind the scenes take a desperate “throw anything at the wall and see what sticks” approach that yields more failures than successes.

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