“What would you say is the demographic for the album, is it mainly idiots?”
These are not my words, but one of Simon Amstell’s brilliantly acerbic taunts on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, directed at swiftly-forgotten chart vixen Eliza Doolittle.
Still, they seem entirely appropriate as I guffaw my way through the obvously carefully manufactured Take Me Home, the new album from fiendishly handsome teen sensations One Direction. Take Me Home barely strays from the infinitely marketable blueprint laid out by 1D’s supersmash ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, a black hole of a song that found Niall Horan and co paying every willing female in the universe an utterly baffling compliment. Much of LP number two revolves around the same paradoxical theme: you, the listener, are gorgeous, but you’re tragically blinded by a lack of confidence which, confusingly, makes you even more gorgeous.
Acoustic lullabies ‘Little Things’ and ‘Over Again’, both co-written by fellow chart-topper Ed Sheeran, play around with this same motif, while ‘C’mon, C’mon’, ‘Kiss You’ and ‘Last First Kiss’ opt for straight-up seduction. ‘They Don’t Know About Us’ gingerly follows the you’re-the-only-one-who-understands-me line and ‘I Would’ suggests that, given half the chance, the 1D member of your choosing would treat you like the milk-bathed queen that you wish you were.
Lies! Surely even the dullest of crayons could identify Take Me Home as a collection of shameless fibs, cooked up by a crack team of songwriters to sell records, especially since we’ve yet to see these globetrotting mini-cads step out with the kind of freckle-coated, squidgy-thighed creature they describe in their songs.
Perhaps the fact that One Direction are, well, deceiving an entire planet of young girls would cause more problems if these five angel-faced boys didn’t look and sound so bloody wonderful. Yes, even your humble critic must confess to fancying one of them (the part-Pakistani one, if you must know, although I often wonder if I’m confusing lust with envy), and to swaying dreamily along to certified tearjerker ‘Little Things’. Then there’s ‘Heart Attack’, a deliciously energetic piece of ear-stroking bubblegum pop, and its bouncy counterpart ‘Kiss Me’, which all but propelled me out of my seat upon first listen.
So you see, as much as I might in theory detest the kind of presumptuous schmaltz that Take Me Home revels in, the odds are undeniably in One Direction’s favour. Dizzying synth-play, skyscraping falsetto, party-starting nu-disco beats, love-stricken growling, sensitive strumming, candy-coated words delivered with Olympic medal-worthy earnestness all adds up to almost perfect pop.
Key Track: ‘Little Things’