American
box stores hoping to peddle One Direction’s new album “Take Me Home” in
significant numbers this holiday season should stock it in the checkout aisle
where it belongs, near the Twizzlers, betwixt the Twix.
The boy
band’s sophomore album is pop candy in the purest sense — sweet, colorful, and
unlike so many releases aimed at ticklish tweenage hearts, consistent. There’s
no filler in a bag of Skittles, right? Just Skittles.
That makes
Simon Cowell the Willy Wonka of this group’s success story, which goes like so:
Back in 2010, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis
Tomlinson crossed paths on the set of “The X Factor,” the British singing
contest that Cowell imported to American television just last year. Each
entered the ring as a solo act but the five emerged as One Direction (and
finished in third place).
Two years
later, the lads have racked up worldwide sales of more than 3 million for their
debut album “Up All Night” and have joined Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson
in the sparsely populated column of not-horrible reality singing show
graduates.
Will the
fame last? One Direction doesn’t seem to care too much about that. The new
album’s first single, “Live While We’re Young,” is a battle cry for the
YOLOgeneration, a giddy ode to seizing the day and “doing what we do, just
pretending that we’re cool.”
Catch
that? They’re just pretending that they’re cool, exuding a sly self-awareness
that actually makes them seem wise and, in turn, pretty cool. The rest of the
song zips along at the tempo of a fluttering heart until all five cannonball
into the big, walloping chorus: “Let’s go crazy, crazy, crazy ’til we see the
sun!” It’s a contagious singalong, with no one voice leading the charge, no
frontman, no star. They harmonize like the world’s first socialist boy band.
Something
else that sets One Direction apart from ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and
generations of chart-topping heartthrobs before them: They appear immune to
outside contemporary influences. There’s no tip-toeing toward R&B radio, no
whiplashing dubstep breakdowns, no compromises.
Instead,
these uptempo love songs bounce around in their own dreamy, vacuum-sealed
universe, quietly snatching spare parts from rock hits that might be too old
for their young fans to recognize. The intro of “Live Like We’re Young” echoes
the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” while “Rock Me” is a sanitized mash
of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.”
The
group’s best songs are dazzlingly efficient. “Heart Attack” finds them
rebounding from a set of broken hearts in less than three minutes while “Last
First Kiss” squeezes a lifelong romance into a seven-word pickup line: “Let me
be your last first kiss.”
Out of 13
tracks, only “Little Things” goes sour. The boys pass an acoustic guitar around
the campfire, cataloging their girlfriends’ physical hangups— “the crinkles by
your eyes,” “your stomach,” “your thighs,” “the dimples in your back,” “how
much you weigh” and the fact that “you still have to squeeze into your jeans.”
Then, they brush everything aside in harmony, singing, “I’m in love with you
and all these little things.”
Bad deja
vu. “What Makes You Beautiful,” the group’s biggest hit from its debut album,
offered a similarly distressing chorus: “You don’t know you’re beautiful/That’s
what makes you beautiful.”
Yes, their
aim feels true. (My love transcends superficialities!) But the subtext feels
gross.(Your low self-esteem is kinda hot!) On an album packed with songs
guaranteed to make young admirers feel so good, why prey on the insecurities
that make them feel so bad?
No comments:
Post a Comment