The Saturdays

“Living for the Weekend”

Fascination/Polydor/Mercury

You can blame Phil Spector for The Saturdays. When Spector put Darlene Love in a studio to record “He’s a Rebel” so The Crystals could then lip sync over it and score a No. 1 hit, he opened the world’s eyes to the idea that pop success could be manufactured out of whole cloth. Jump cut 40 years, and now we have bands being assembled on reality shows. “Living for the Weekend” isn’t good. It’s fine if you’re 14 and he hasn’t returned your texts in two days and you just need something to sing into your hairbrush, but in any other context this is the same old pap churned out by the Pop Music Xerox Machine. The Saturdays are exactly like (insert any British girl band here) and will be replaced by (British girl band to be released in 2014). CV

Listen at http://www.thesaturdays.co.uk.

Bad Religion

“Christmas Songs”

Epitaph

This is a real thing. Bad Religion has done Christmas songs before — usually on a lark — but the idea of doing a full album can’t work… can it? On the face of it, an album like “Christmas Songs” — being released in October, no less — flies in the face of everything Bad Religion has been all about: It’s commercial, it’s safe and it’s openly contributing (and pandering) to the hyper-merchandised sensibilities of the Christmas-gorging mainstream. Whether it’s good or not winds up taking a back seat to whether it’s a good idea or not. Bad Religion fans may buy the album as a joke, but the tracks are all a bit too earnestly done to laugh at. And, since Bad Religion has been flirting with this concept for years, it’s not even a particularly fresh idea. BR fans may, possibly, get a kick out of it. And maybe that’ll be enough. CV

Find “Christmas Songs” on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/christmas-songs/id701162374.