RCA
Pop, 2001

Louis Walsh is one lucky bugger. He gets five talentless trolls together, give them third rate ballads to sing, and watch the money roll in.

It is hard to imagine that Westlife gets this far. Their formula seems to be nothing but ballads. The “talented” one (read: the one who can carry a tune but is too fat to be in the limelight) sings, the four parasites go “Ooh, aah”, and they stand up from their chairs to wave their hands at the climax – “OOH! AAH!” Seventeen songs pack World of Our Own, their third putrefying attack on the world, and almost all are lifeless ballads. The five lads sing with all the emotional poignancy of a crack nut on withdrawal symptoms, and the music is just as epic. From faux Bee Gees bop to tiresome octogenarian ballads, our five talent-free young men sing in all their vocally constipated glory in a showcase that rivals… er, nobody in their puke-bucket glory.

World of Our Own makes alley cats in heat sound good. As the discriminating try to stop the massive bleeding from their ears and noses, Westlife’s ruthless zombiefication of the music world continues. All this proves one thing: Louis Walsh is the true son of Satan. Can someone gag that fiend and send him to Mars or something?

More importantly, can these five use-free so-called talents spend all their cash on drugs, sex, and whatever, get bankrupt, and fade into oblivion?

Westlife is so atrociously bad that these tossers are indeed in a world of their own. If you see a red streak zooming into the outer atmospheres of Earth, don’t worry. That’s just my radio, hurled out the window when they played one too many times that Queen of My Heart garbage tune. Did I mention how they sound like drugged-up nutcases in that song?