Syco
Pop, 2012
A new album already? So fast? Well, I guess it’s best to quickly make hay while the sun still shines. After all, those little girls are growing up quickly, and their allegiance would most likely shift to the next group of chipmunks to emerge from the boyband factory once One Direction reach their expiry date.
Take Me Home is a very cunningly constructed album. The lead single Live While We’re Young is an irresponsibly catchy song shamelessly built on the riffs borrowed from the Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go?. Other songs are patterned similarly – they dig deep into everything from the sun-soaked feel-good songs from the 1960s to recognizable “boyband songs by Max Martin” sounds of the 1990s. These lads’ overlords even paid a truckload of money to Ed Sheeran to hand over two songs from his reject bin. Little Things and Over Again would rate as fifth-rate songs in Mr Sheeran’s repertoire, but here, as part of One Direction’s catalog of vapid feel-good tunes, these songs are tightly grasped by their PR handlers as evidence that these lads can do “credible music” too.
The one thing that can put off anyone over the age of eighteen or who isn’t into hairless chipmunks is that nearly every song here is about sex. These guys want to have sex with you. They want to shag you, boink you, roll you up, touch you everywhere, and then some. There is more pork here than a pig farm. Unfortunately, because these guys can’t get too explicit with the sexual suggestions or those poor little girls would be scarred for life, the insipid “naughtiness” of these songs often end up unintentionally hilarious.
Oh, and my favorite song here is Change My Mind, which is one of the sweetest songs I’ve heard to deal with a guy pressuring a gal to put out to him.
Ultimately, yes, it may seem shameful to enjoy the melodious manufactured banality of One Direction. Let’s look at it this way, however. Listening to these five chipmunks is akin to having a weekend fling – there’s no strings attached, and nobody has to know when these five lads sink back into obscurity and try to flog embarrassing stories of drug addictions to tabloids for rent money. It’s transient and it doesn’t make one fat. So really, there’s nothing wrong with a little shame in one’s life now and then.
