Four tracks into Sounds from Nowheresville comes Give It Back, a song that appears to describe the torturous gestation of the Ting Tings' second album. "This could have been perfection, but we had a little sense," sings Katie White. "So we started all again." That is the story the duo recently told the Observer. Halfway through recording a dance-inspired follow-up to their 2m-selling debut We Started Nothing, they said, they completely wiped the album, replacing it with the 30 minutes of music here. It was an act of snotty defiance: their record company had heard some demos and claimed it was going to be "fucking huge". "I bet you made a copy because you're dirtier than I," sneers Jules De Martino on Give It Back. "I've seen the way that you lie."
Curiously, though, on their record company's website, you can still find what seems to be a press release for the album the Ting Tings apparently wiped. There's always the chance that this was something the label hastily cobbled together after hearing a few demos midway through the recording, but it doesn't read like it. It describes the sleeve artwork by LA artist Rosson Crow, mentions Calvin Harris's involvement in the album's mixing, offers glowing quotes from White and deMartino explaining their change of direction (they wanted "songs with a lot more depth and emotion" and a "fresh start") as an act of snotty defiance: "We had people saying: 'Do what you did the first time, it'll be even bigger this time,' and we thought: 'Well, no.'" It mentions seven songs, five of which appear on Sounds from Nowheresville and may be among the best tracks: the icy one-chord drone of Silence, and Help, which shifts from acoustic ballad to a euphoric electronic coda. The two that don't are the single Hands, which unveiled their new direction in October 2010, and This Is Not a Hit, a title that presumably seemed a little less hilariously knowing when Hands stalled at No 29. And then, a couple of weeks back, the Ting Tings told another interviewer they'd wiped the album in protest at Radio 1 playlisting Hands against their wishes.
It's all a bit peculiar. Actually, it's so peculiar that one might suggest it seems more likely the Ting Tings reconsidered the wisdom of their new direction when Hands bombed and they're now coming up with any old cobblers to save face. Or maybe their record label reconsidered the wisdom of it for them, which would account for the brimstone raining down on it in the Ting Tings' interviews and on Give It Back: "You ruined my life."
Whatever the reasons behind the change of heart, what's left certainly doesn't sound much like a record-company-baiting screw-you gesture, unless you count Soul Killing, a bouncy bit of pop-reggae rendered unlistenable by the teeth-gritting squeak of de Martino's drum stool, looped and high in the mix. Anyone unconvinced by the duo's version of events might suggest there's something passive-aggressive in the way it often sounds like the Ting Tings' debut album, but without any hooks. In marked contrast to We Started Nothing, which yielded six singles, Sounds from Nowheresville is an album entirely comprised of album tracks. Like That's Not My Name, Hang It Up has a simple two-note guitar riff, but unlike That's Not My Name, it has literally no tune at all: not in the confrontationally atonal sense but in the rattling-on-a-little-aimlessly sense. Nor does Guggenheim, which is a shame, because the verses are great, a spoken-word monologue that recalls Cristina's snotty new-wave rereading of Is That All There Is?: you keep anticipating a fantastic chorus that never comes.
What Sounds from Nowheresville most obviously evokes isn't anger or even if-we-must sulkiness, but confusion. It keeps doing the things bands do when they don't really know what to do: concentrating on riffs instead of melodies, production dynamics instead of songs. The result is an album that sounds simultaneously hefty and vaporous. The drums crack and thunder, the guitars sting and crunch and the synthesiser on One By One bubbles appealingly, but the songs vanish without trace almost as soon as they leave the speakers. Decent ideas – Guggenheim's verses, the descending chord sequence of Hit Me Down Sonny – seem to drift away from them, untethered to anything substantial. The bluster in Hang It Up's lyrics about what punk rock is and isn't – with the best will in the world, not really a question anyone's looking to the Ting Tings to answer – is undercut by a sense of anti-climactic doubt: "People say it's not worth the wait."
Under the circumstances, Give It Back starts feeling less defiant than resigned and elegiac. "I only got to know you and now we're on our way," sings De Martino. "Be good if we could just stay but I don't know how," adds White. Whether by default or design, the Ting Tings appear to be saying goodbye to their audience.
