POP
"Doll Domination"
Pussycat Dolls. Interscope. 16 tracks.
The Pussycat Dolls with their million-selling 2005 album, "PCD," and its image-defining single "Don't Cha" — which taunted, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" — the Pussycat Dolls set themselves up as sexy, assertive, stylish, independent, competitive, camera-ready and club-savvy. But were they, strictly speaking, human?
That's what their new album, "Doll Domination," sets out to establish. Between dance tracks concocted by big-time producers like Rodney Jerkins, Timbaland, Sean Garrett and Polow Da Don, the Pussycat Dolls flaunt a newly prominent accessory: a breakable heart. In the 16 songs on this fully packed album, each striving to be a single, the Dolls still flirt and strut most of the time. But now, every so often, they ache.
Not that the Pussycat Dolls are turning realistic. They are, after all, a burlesque dance troupe that was recast as a vocal group featuring Nicole Scherzinger. On the album she is credited with "all lead and background vocals," with the other four Dolls providing "additional" vocals.
Scherzinger's small, flexible voice thrives in the programmed, computer-tuned R&B tracks. She adopts Britney Spears' breathiness against the sirens, shouts and pumping beat of "When I Grow Up," a song about craving fame, and she juggles melody, chants and vocal harmonies in "Whatcha Think About That," which proposes that her man stay home while she goes club-hopping. She coos and flirts with R. Kelly in "Out of This Club," and in "Whatchamacallit," by Timbaland and others, she sasses competitors wanting to know about her fashion sources and her man's abilities.
Now, however, the Pussycat Dolls also look at what happens after the infatuation ends. Scherzinger nears a sob in "I Hate This Part," about the conversation before a breakup, and in the ballad "Happily Never After," from that sensitive guy Ne-Yo, a woman drives away, uncertain and then smiling, from the man who's not treating her right. No less crafty or calculated than their bump-and-grind numbers, the farewell songs are a move toward expanding the franchise. Now the Pussycat Dolls are stocking a little empathy along with the attitude.
— Jon Pareles, New York Times
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