So Together Innosense RCA, 2000 Tracks 1: Ride 2: Say No More 3: Beep Beep 4: So Together 5: This Is It 6: Rain Rain 7: You Didn't Have To Hurt Me 8: www.fan-ta-see 9: A Hundred Oceans 10: A Real Good Man 11: You Can't Touch Me Now 12: I Wish   Buy it online Reviewed by Sienna Powers	From the very first glance, Innosense offers a strong sense of deja vu. In the first place there are five of them: two brunettes, a redhead, one with streaky red/gold/brown hair as well as a blue-eyed blonde with an expression so adorable it makes you want to injure her. At least a little. This particular bunch of bodacious babes hail from the United States so maybe... Spice West? At least, like I said, at first glance. The second glance confirms it. Can you spell d-e-r-i-v-a-t-i-v-e? I knew you could. Aside from the uncanny physical resemblance to the earliest Spice Girl lineup, Innosense reaches for the same type of material: with less success. There is nothing on their first album, So Together with the originality of "Wannabe," the tune that popped the Brit quintet into the stratosphere. But forget the Spice Girls, there is almost more material about Innosense that prohibits originality than bears thinking about. Nikki DeLoach (one of the brunettes) is yet another Mousketeer alumna. She shared mouse troupe duties with Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera as well as J.C. Chasez and Justin Timberlake of 'NSync. In fact, Timberlake's mom, Lynn Harless, played a big part in putting Innosense together. From the small world department, Danay Ferrer (the other brunette) went to high school with another 'NSyncer, Joey Fatone. Mandy Ashford (the blonde) was a classmate of yet another 'NSyncer, Lance Bass. Ironically -- or maybe not so -- Britney Spears was part of the original Innosense lineup, but left it all behind for stardom. (Well, she never really struck me as a team player. You?) The only thing that's really alarming about any of this is that the press machine reports it all like it's good stuff. As though being the brainstorm of an 'NSync mom and having been dumped by this year's flavor teenybopper is a good thing. It goes almost without saying (but, of course, I'll say it anyway) that none of the songs on So Together were written by any of the members of Innosense. At all. The producers and management did, however, secure the very best songwriters that money could buy. For example, Grammy-winning Diane Warren wrote two of the songs on So Together. Warren has also written songs for Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Toni Braxton, among others. The producer list for the album is long and includes talent that has worked with 'NSync, Aguilera, Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees. A team that knows how to work with boy bands. Why not apply the same techniques to a girl band? Indeed. Predictably, the resulting album is heavy on the dance tunes with a couple of oh-the-pain ballads thrown in for good measure: You didn't have to hurt me, hurt me You didn't have to make me, make me cry You didn't have to break my, break my heart in a thousand pieces Why oh why Why oh why And no: the repeated lyrics above weren't generated by a typo. The lyrics are just... well... repetitive. It'll come as no surprise that Innosense is the product of Lou Perlman's Orlando-based Trans Continental Companies. A recent issue of Vanity Fair described Perlman as the "Pop alchemist... whose frothy bands have a stranglehold on the top 40." While this might be an overstatement, it's true that Trans Continental has given birth to the Backstreet Boys, O-Town, LFO, Take 5, 'NSync and others. I don't mean to say that So Together is a terrible album. It's not. The harmonies work. The girls' voices mesh nicely. It's thickly and slickly produced. The sounds quality is, of course, very good. The dance songs are inarguably danceable and the love songs are appropriately mooshy. I just wonder if the world really needs yet another manufactured sachrine-laden collective. Angst will tell. | November 2000   Sienna Powers is a writer, editor and visual artist.	I don't mean to say that So Together is a terrible album. It's not. The harmonies work. The girls' voices mesh nicely. It's thickly and slickly produced. The sounds quality is, of course, very good. The dance songs are inarguably danceable and the love songs are appropriately mooshy. I just wonder if the world really needs yet another manufactured sachrine-laden collective.