Bananarama's first album sounded like Fun Boy Three without the boys, but definitely with their ironic sense of "fun." The female trio's remake of "He Was Really Saying Something," with its drop-dead, blasé reading of the key line "Bop bop shoobee do wa-ah," was a girl-group classic.

Their new album sounds like the Coconuts without Kid Creole: in a word, insipid. Producers Tony Swain and Steve...

This can't work. Three young women who dance their way through London's hottest clubs and decide, hey, let's start a band; who insist on playing their own instruments, even though they regard learning how to play those instruments with the enthusiasm that most of us have for ironing; who waltz through three different producers in the course of a year and a half; and who sing soul covers and their...