PICK OF THE WEEK: ONE DIRECTION
ONE DIRECTION
Take Me Home (Columbia/Sony)
(out of 4) Having never practised kissing my pillow while the image of Harry Styles dances inside my head and “What Makes You Beautiful” simpers away in the background in a bedroom slathered in One Direction posters, I am grossly unqualified to offer an opinion on Take Me Home.
If I ever have a daughter, I pray that she has better taste by 11 or 12. This quintet of charming British and Irish teenagers, borne of the U.K. X Factor series, works from the standard boy-band playbook: danceable party tracks with sleepover- shaking choruses, “Girl, I been waitin’ for you” come-ons designed to wring maximum swoon from hormone-wracked adolescent girls and the odd teary-eyed ballad — but they do it with a reasonable amount of humour and with musical accompaniment that at least makes a nominal attempt to expand the genre’s instrumental palette beyond whitewashed R&B. Pseudo-power ballads such as “Last First Kiss” and “Change My Mind” tend toward Bryan Adams at his most drearily sentimental. Bouncier numbers like “Kiss You” and the damnably infectious “Back for You” recall the pristine clatter of Def Leppard circa Hysteria crossed with the boisterous 4/4 thump of contemporary dance-pop. The songs all sound more or less exactly the same, mind you, but there are clever little references to pop hits past — The Clash’s “Should I Stay (Or Should I Go)” on hit “Live While We’re Young,” for instance, or Queen’s “We Will Rock You” on “Rock Me.” Brit balladeer Ed Sheeran, who co-wrote “Moments” on 1D’s debut album, pitches in here with “Little Things” and “Over Again,” to provide some respite from the assembly-line fare.
Top track: “I Would.” The 1D lads feel terribly uncool chatting up a girl whose boyfriend has “27 tattoos.”
Ben Rayner