Album Review: Ten by Girls Aloud

The commemorative compilation Ten doesn't contain all the singles featured on Girls Aloud's previous anthology, 2006's The Sound of Girls Aloud, but it functions as an update. There is an eight-song overlap between the releases, including the number one U.K. singles "Sound of the Underground" and "I'll Stand by You." With the exception of "Walk This Way," all of the group's post-Sound of Girls Aloud singles, such as "The Promise" -- yet another U.K.

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For so many years, I referred to Girls Aloud as my 'guilty pleasure'. Then something changed - I began to accept my love, no matter how many times people around me smirked. Because really, pop is a medium as valid and wonderful (and equally as cynical and flawed) as anything else in the ecosystem of music. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people should like it: not everyone likes metal, minimalist electronica, folk or classical music.

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Girls Aloud are as huge a pop act as the UK has seen in the past decade, yet they've never so much as dented the American charts. Cheryl Cole, Sarah Harding, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts, and Kimberley Walsh were put together on the reality show Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, and they proceeded to score 20 consecutive British Top 10 singles over the next seven years. That series of hits may well be their legacy, despite the fact that they've reunited for four new songs on this retrospective, their second greatest hits compilation to date.

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Incredible proof of how perfect pop can be in the right hands. Ian Wade 2012 Now celebrating their tenth anniversary, Girls Aloud have released an almost blight-free series of fantastic singles and breathtaking albums. They’ve come a long way from their reality TV beginnings, becoming not only tabloid darlings but close to national treasures. On hiatus after 2008’s Out of Control, Girls Aloud left something of a hole in the mainstream music landscape.

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