P.Y.T. (Down with Me) in Bloomington, MN

Yet another entry into the
teen pop
sweepstakes,
P.Y.T.
is four teenage girls from Tampa, FL, with extensive experience as professional children. (
Lauren Mayhew
plays
Marra
on the soap opera
Guiding Light
;
Tracy Williams
and
Lydia Bell
have done
musical theater
.) Their handlers have, for the most part, surrounded them with producer/musicians intent on replicating the sounds of
Britney Spears
/
Destiny's Child
, with skittering stop-and-start drum programming dominating the all-synthesized musical accompaniment and vocal arrangers putting the girls through patter-filled, rhythmic vocal acrobatics on lyrics about love and romantic betrayal. They can sing, and they can harmonize, but they are not particularly distinctive, and they have occasional articulation problems. They also sometimes sound uncomfortable in such urban settings. Late into the disc, on the
ballad
"A Girl Can Dream"
and especially the
folk-pop
confection
"Sweet Kisses,"
they sound much more at home. But
Epic
records is not promoting such tracks; the label is counting on the generic
dance-pop
of
"Same Ol' Same Ol',"
which is presented in no less than three versions, two of them prominently featuring rapper
Sarai
, who also is given her own solo performance on the hidden track, a preview of her upcoming album. Record industry practice holds that groups like this must be slavishly molded to sound like what's currently popular, but there is a glut of music that sounds like this, and
would be better advised to take the girls' real individual talents into consideration in recording and marketing them. As it is,
"Same Ol' Same Ol'"
is an unintentionally telling description of their debut album. (The CD is an enhanced disc that contains the music video for
a typical dance extravaganza.) ~ William Ruhlmann