REBELS - RBD

TEEN Mexican Pop group RBD has unveiled an English-language crossover album Rebels.

The group - three girls and three boys - gained fame and a huge following while starring in the telenovela Rebelde, a drama about students at a Rebelde private, upper-class boarding school who form a band.

And so, they did.

The vocals are primarily handled by Cristian, the most fluent singer in the group, with the chorus sung in unison by the group, with dashes of Spanish guitars to give it just enough Latin flavouring.

Combining rock, dance and R&B sounds with a Latin flair, RBD starts off the album with Tu Amor, written by Diane Amor Warren, who turns in a lyric that is bilingual yet elementary in its simplicity.

Within just three days of its release, the song was all over the four most-listened-to Top 40 stations in the US, proving itself to be a mainstream smash.

Wanna Play and Carino Mio are both excellently light yet trendy reggaeton production style and traded boy-girl vocals that accentuate the undercurrent of budding sexuality central to these bump-and-grind dance songs.

Connected is a promising song, as is I Wanna Be The Rain, yet its stilted English pronunciation and overly simple lyrics weigh too heavily on the songs.

Money Money is another reggaeton song that samples their previous hit in this genre, Lento and despite the and despite the English title, it's the only track on the album that is completely sung in Spanish.

The band received a Latin Grammy Award-nomination for the Best Pop Album by a Group or Duo category for their second studio album Nuestro Amor, but after Amor selling several albums in their native Spanish language by the millions, their first attempt at an English language album works about as well as you would expect from such a manufactured effort from a pop sextet of actors.

A few sparkles of gems lie in this album. But rather than sounding gorgeous and uplifting RBD, ends up sounding like amateur children's pop instead of more mature wideranging pop they are striving for. - NST 15/07/2007