Albums : One Direction : Midnight Memories (Deluxe)
Albums : One Direction : Midnight Memories (Deluxe)
Listen To One Direction : Midnight Memories (Deluxe)
My colleagues thought this would be funny. "Romano, I've got an idea for you," one of them said on a conference call. "You should review Midnight Memories, the new One Direction album." I could barely understand him because he was laughing so hard.
My colleague was laughing, I suppose, because I do not seem like the sort of person who would like One Direction. In fact, I'm pretty sure I seem like the sort of person who would hate One Direction. I'm 31 years old. I'm male. I once lived down the street from an artisanal mayonnaise shop in Brooklyn. My last music story was an admiring profile of Jake Bugg, the young, rootsy British singer-songwriter who recently said that One Direction "must know they're terrible" because they "sing meaningless tunes." I don't know what a Harry Styles is. And I don't think I've ever heard a single One Direction song in the wild.
If all of that doesn't qualify me to review One Direction's latest LP, I don't know what does. So here we are.
I took the assignment for two reasons. The first is that when people talk about One Direction, they tend to talk about everything but the music. Their Simon Cowell-X Factor genesis story. Their hormonal teen-girl fanbase. Their 16.5 million Twitter followers. Their stratospheric record sales (19 million singles and 10 million albums in about two years). And, of course, the tabloid exploits of resident ladies' man Styles, who is one of the 14,000 celebrities to have dated Taylor Swift (so far). I figured that a blind musical taste test—a review by someone who might as well be an alien from another galaxy as far as One Direction is concerned—could yield some interesting results.
The second reason I took the assignment is that I'm not actually as offended by "manufactured pop music" as I'm supposed to be. In fact, I think that people who behave as if they're morally repulsed by it—such as the commenter on a recent One Direction piece in the Guardian who wrote "Do we really need reviews here of this tripe?," or the one who described the band's music as "a right bag of wank"—are either hypocritical or myopic.
Myopic because these also tend to be the sort of listeners who subscribe to the auteurist theory of popular music, in which an artist who writes his own songs and plays his own instruments is automatically better than an artist who sings someone else's songs and employs backing musicians—never mind the fact that this sort of collaboration was the norm until the Beatles and Bob Dylan came along and has recently become the norm again. By such standards, Frank Sinatra was "inauthentic." So is Beyoncé. That's a pretty shortsighted approach to music, historically speaking.
Chances are it's hypocritical as well. In my experience, listeners who mock contemporary acts such as One Direction are often very fond of older groups cut from the same cloth. For example, I adore the girl groups of the early 1960s: The Cookies, The Ronettes, The Shangri La's, and so on. I also love Motown. But there's no real structural difference between One Direction and, say, The Shirelles. Like One Direction, The Shirelles were groomed by an industry Svengali. They performed songs written by professionals. They let producers and session musicians assemble their records for them. They wore matching outfits and sported similar haircuts. Sure, boy-band songs all sort of sound the same: adrenalized tempos, computerized harmonies, exuberant choruses. But most girl-group songs sounded the same, too. They're just a few decades older at this point. Patinaed. Age makes everything seem a little more "authentic."
None of which means, of course, that One Direction's music is any good—just that there's no honest reason to think that it couldn't be. Which is what I wanted to find out by reviewing Midnight Memories. How are these songs? These performances? These recordings? Is One Direction today's version of The Shirelles, or The Monkees, or Boyz II Men? Or do they fall short of the best of their manufactured-pop predecessors?
On Saturday morning, I received an advance download of Midnight Memories. I had to drive from Los Angeles to Rancho Mirage that afternoon—a four-hour roundtrip. I listened to the LP all the way out to the desert and all the way back.
It's not a great album. Then again—in the finest pop tradition—it's not really supposed to be. Instead, Midnight Memories is more like a bunch of aspiring singles jumbled together, jostling for attention.
Some don't deserve much. The title track, a Def Leppardish stomper that's received a lot of pre-release publicity for supposedly showcasing 1D's new, rockier direction, is abysmal. An unconvincing riff-rock verse gives way to an ascending double-time bridge; the whole thing climaxes in a faux-"Pour Some Sugar on Me" chorus. It all sounds so cold and calculated—like a song assembled from spare parts left behind by Joe Elliot, Nikki Sixx, and Steven Tyler for an off-off-Broadway musical about The Age of Hair Metal—that it's impossible to get through, even though it's less than three minutes long.
"Happily," "Something Great," "Better Than Words," and "Through the Dark," are less irritating but no better, really. They're either bland, unmemorable pop (the first three) or bland, unsuccessful rip-offs of Mumford & Sons (the last one). It's been a day since my Midnight Memories road trip and I could barely remember enough about them to write the previous sentence.
That's the bad news. The good news is that One Direction are appealing singers and seamless harmonizers, and that the rest of the songs here—nine in all, the vast majority—are strong enough to be singles. A few, in fact, are pretty terrific.
One Direction's sudden Mumford fixation doesn't always disappoint. The current single "Story of My Life," for instance, strikes me as one of the best songs of the year—a gentle acoustic loper that starts out sounding a lot like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" before bursting into a big, simple, beautiful hook that gets stuck in your head the first time you hear it and refuses to leave for the next 48 hours (at least). "Diana" is just as addictive: marry a stuttering "Don't Stand So Close to Me" verse to a charging "Boys of Summer" chorus and you're bound to wind up with a very effective hunk of power pop. "You and I," meanwhile, is a lovely, asymmetrical little ballad that never indulges in the kind of soggy bombast that sinks so many boy-band love songs—perhaps because it was patterned on Peter Gabriel's immortal "In Your Eyes." (One Direction's core songwriting team—Jamie Scott, John Ryan, and Julian Bunetta—clearly subscribe to the "good artists copy; great artists steal" school of thought; the beginning of first single "Best Song Ever" is such a cheeky rip-off of The Who's "Baba O'Riley" that it's kind of endearing.)
Best of all, perhaps, is "Little Black Dress." Over a hot, slashing guitar riff that recalls Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen—or even Jimmy Page on one of his poppier days—the formerly PG-rated One Direction lads leer at a young lady who has "just walked into the room, makin' heads turn." "Did you come here alone?" they ask. "It's too late to go home," they explain. "I won't do you no harm," they promise. And then they sing "I wanna see the way you move for me, baby" a dozen times. "Little Black Dress" doesn't explode into massive chorus; it's not really danceable. Instead, it just grooves along, almost messily, sounding like what it's about: sex. You get the sense that this is the kind of music the boys of One Direction actually enjoy listening to—and making.
So am I going to listen to Midnight Memories every day? Probably not. For now I'm too busy spinning my Shirelles records, and I suspect I always will be. But when one of these songs comes on the radio, I'll happily turn up the volume and sing along.
Human beings—especially music fans over the age of, say, 25—usually assume that the present is worse than the past. That the culture has lost its way. That today's pop stars are uniquely plastic, uniquely talentless, uniquely reprehensible. That the nadir is now.
But pop music never really changes all that much. It's catchy and romantic and adolescent. Sometimes it's disposable. Sometimes it sticks with you. At its best, a pop song can give you three minutes of pure pleasure without asking all that much in return. Walling yourself off from the possibility of experiencing that kind of escape again and again, in real time, seems like a pretty boring way to live.
Midnight Memories Review
After two albums of flirting, hand-holding and coltish fumbling at parties, One Direction might just have finally gone all the way on their third album, Midnight Memories. Maybe.
There is a track on the deluxe edition – widely disseminated online – called Why Don't We Go There, in which Harry Styles propositions some nubile interlocutor. "We got all night," he reasons, "we're going nowhere/ Why don't you stay?/ Why don't we go… there?" he asks, eyebrow cocked. "If you give in tonight/ Just let me set you free." If you are a squeaky-clean boy band attempting to manage a transition into your 20s, naming your ever-so-slightly-more-grown-up album Midnight Memories, you are probably going to have to acknowledge, somehow, that things happen in the dark other than the nonstop japery of your first album, Up All Night, and all the "going crazy-crazy-crazy till we see the sun" of album number two, Take Me Home. This is not a bad way of going about it: parking a little lust on the deluxe edition.
Then there is the small matter of the vanilla leering, which takes place on the main album. On Little Black Dress, One Direction turn from excellent boyfriend material – caring, devoted, well turned out, easily hurt – to something more akin to one-night-standees. "I wanna see the way you move for me, baby," it goes, as goaty a lyric as these nice boys have ever essayed. Poodle-rock guitars complete the picture of band slipping their hands out of yours and into their trouser pockets. (And what does Louis Tomlinson actually mean when, on Happily, he asks his ex whether her new boyfriend "feels his traces" in her hair?)
Admitting the existence of sex is not the only overt sign of looming maturity on One Direction's third album in three heady years, one that looks certain to cement them as a global phenomenon. The band forecast that Midnight Memories would be "rockier" than their previous efforts, which have largely cleaved fairly close to the bright'n'breezy Swedish school of pop-plus-doe-eyed balladry. And yet that doesn't quite prepare you for the extended soft-rock passages, the Joan Jett-ish thrust of Zayn Malik's Does He Know? or the sheer Van Halen-like bombast of the title track, one of two touring-band anthems ("Way too many people in the Addison Lee!"). Its dynamics seem to be targeting some notional American heartland at least 30 years older than 1D's fanbase.
Lady Gaga struggled a bit to carry off such a major pop-to-rock volte-face on Born This Way, but one of the theories about why Katy Perry is doing so well has something to do with her propensity for guitars. Here, this new taste for Def Leppard comes tempered with some even more grown-up fare: a Mumfords nod, a Police tribute and a flaccid one co-written by Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody (Something Great). Most Directioners will already have heard the Mumfords-inspired Story of My Life, in which some sort of romantic contretemps finds the boys in a darkroom in the video, developing photographs (a mysterious practice that may have to be explained to their fanbase). The catchy Diana, meanwhile, is a naked rewrite of at least three songs of some vintage, not least Don't Stand So Close to Me.
Given how Miley Cyrus has handled her transition from teen star to adult material, all eyes are on how these 20-nothing pop powerhouses manage their progression from pecks on the cheeks to kissing with tongues, from scallywaggery to manhood. Ultimately, the vast bulk of Midnight Memories remains emotionally charged rather than carnally inclined, with not a soupçon of R&B anywhere and love songs galore.
What's really significant, though, is that the band are now co-writing greater swaths of their material, and that Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Niall Horan are getting more time on the mic. A lack of democracy and asset-sharing has sunk many a band, never mind a boy band. This album does the job, in more ways than one.
Contact One Direction
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | YouTube | Soundcloud
Contact The Daily Beast
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Contact The Guardian
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Sources : One Direction Photo | Listen To Midnight Memories (Deluxe) | One Direction Article | Midnight Memories (Deluxe) Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Walmart
Listen To One Direction : Midnight Memories (Deluxe)
My colleagues thought this would be funny. "Romano, I've got an idea for you," one of them said on a conference call. "You should review Midnight Memories, the new One Direction album." I could barely understand him because he was laughing so hard.
My colleague was laughing, I suppose, because I do not seem like the sort of person who would like One Direction. In fact, I'm pretty sure I seem like the sort of person who would hate One Direction. I'm 31 years old. I'm male. I once lived down the street from an artisanal mayonnaise shop in Brooklyn. My last music story was an admiring profile of Jake Bugg, the young, rootsy British singer-songwriter who recently said that One Direction "must know they're terrible" because they "sing meaningless tunes." I don't know what a Harry Styles is. And I don't think I've ever heard a single One Direction song in the wild.
If all of that doesn't qualify me to review One Direction's latest LP, I don't know what does. So here we are.
I took the assignment for two reasons. The first is that when people talk about One Direction, they tend to talk about everything but the music. Their Simon Cowell-X Factor genesis story. Their hormonal teen-girl fanbase. Their 16.5 million Twitter followers. Their stratospheric record sales (19 million singles and 10 million albums in about two years). And, of course, the tabloid exploits of resident ladies' man Styles, who is one of the 14,000 celebrities to have dated Taylor Swift (so far). I figured that a blind musical taste test—a review by someone who might as well be an alien from another galaxy as far as One Direction is concerned—could yield some interesting results.
The second reason I took the assignment is that I'm not actually as offended by "manufactured pop music" as I'm supposed to be. In fact, I think that people who behave as if they're morally repulsed by it—such as the commenter on a recent One Direction piece in the Guardian who wrote "Do we really need reviews here of this tripe?," or the one who described the band's music as "a right bag of wank"—are either hypocritical or myopic.
Myopic because these also tend to be the sort of listeners who subscribe to the auteurist theory of popular music, in which an artist who writes his own songs and plays his own instruments is automatically better than an artist who sings someone else's songs and employs backing musicians—never mind the fact that this sort of collaboration was the norm until the Beatles and Bob Dylan came along and has recently become the norm again. By such standards, Frank Sinatra was "inauthentic." So is Beyoncé. That's a pretty shortsighted approach to music, historically speaking.
Chances are it's hypocritical as well. In my experience, listeners who mock contemporary acts such as One Direction are often very fond of older groups cut from the same cloth. For example, I adore the girl groups of the early 1960s: The Cookies, The Ronettes, The Shangri La's, and so on. I also love Motown. But there's no real structural difference between One Direction and, say, The Shirelles. Like One Direction, The Shirelles were groomed by an industry Svengali. They performed songs written by professionals. They let producers and session musicians assemble their records for them. They wore matching outfits and sported similar haircuts. Sure, boy-band songs all sort of sound the same: adrenalized tempos, computerized harmonies, exuberant choruses. But most girl-group songs sounded the same, too. They're just a few decades older at this point. Patinaed. Age makes everything seem a little more "authentic."
None of which means, of course, that One Direction's music is any good—just that there's no honest reason to think that it couldn't be. Which is what I wanted to find out by reviewing Midnight Memories. How are these songs? These performances? These recordings? Is One Direction today's version of The Shirelles, or The Monkees, or Boyz II Men? Or do they fall short of the best of their manufactured-pop predecessors?
On Saturday morning, I received an advance download of Midnight Memories. I had to drive from Los Angeles to Rancho Mirage that afternoon—a four-hour roundtrip. I listened to the LP all the way out to the desert and all the way back.
It's not a great album. Then again—in the finest pop tradition—it's not really supposed to be. Instead, Midnight Memories is more like a bunch of aspiring singles jumbled together, jostling for attention.
Some don't deserve much. The title track, a Def Leppardish stomper that's received a lot of pre-release publicity for supposedly showcasing 1D's new, rockier direction, is abysmal. An unconvincing riff-rock verse gives way to an ascending double-time bridge; the whole thing climaxes in a faux-"Pour Some Sugar on Me" chorus. It all sounds so cold and calculated—like a song assembled from spare parts left behind by Joe Elliot, Nikki Sixx, and Steven Tyler for an off-off-Broadway musical about The Age of Hair Metal—that it's impossible to get through, even though it's less than three minutes long.
"Happily," "Something Great," "Better Than Words," and "Through the Dark," are less irritating but no better, really. They're either bland, unmemorable pop (the first three) or bland, unsuccessful rip-offs of Mumford & Sons (the last one). It's been a day since my Midnight Memories road trip and I could barely remember enough about them to write the previous sentence.
That's the bad news. The good news is that One Direction are appealing singers and seamless harmonizers, and that the rest of the songs here—nine in all, the vast majority—are strong enough to be singles. A few, in fact, are pretty terrific.
One Direction's sudden Mumford fixation doesn't always disappoint. The current single "Story of My Life," for instance, strikes me as one of the best songs of the year—a gentle acoustic loper that starts out sounding a lot like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" before bursting into a big, simple, beautiful hook that gets stuck in your head the first time you hear it and refuses to leave for the next 48 hours (at least). "Diana" is just as addictive: marry a stuttering "Don't Stand So Close to Me" verse to a charging "Boys of Summer" chorus and you're bound to wind up with a very effective hunk of power pop. "You and I," meanwhile, is a lovely, asymmetrical little ballad that never indulges in the kind of soggy bombast that sinks so many boy-band love songs—perhaps because it was patterned on Peter Gabriel's immortal "In Your Eyes." (One Direction's core songwriting team—Jamie Scott, John Ryan, and Julian Bunetta—clearly subscribe to the "good artists copy; great artists steal" school of thought; the beginning of first single "Best Song Ever" is such a cheeky rip-off of The Who's "Baba O'Riley" that it's kind of endearing.)
Best of all, perhaps, is "Little Black Dress." Over a hot, slashing guitar riff that recalls Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen—or even Jimmy Page on one of his poppier days—the formerly PG-rated One Direction lads leer at a young lady who has "just walked into the room, makin' heads turn." "Did you come here alone?" they ask. "It's too late to go home," they explain. "I won't do you no harm," they promise. And then they sing "I wanna see the way you move for me, baby" a dozen times. "Little Black Dress" doesn't explode into massive chorus; it's not really danceable. Instead, it just grooves along, almost messily, sounding like what it's about: sex. You get the sense that this is the kind of music the boys of One Direction actually enjoy listening to—and making.
So am I going to listen to Midnight Memories every day? Probably not. For now I'm too busy spinning my Shirelles records, and I suspect I always will be. But when one of these songs comes on the radio, I'll happily turn up the volume and sing along.
Human beings—especially music fans over the age of, say, 25—usually assume that the present is worse than the past. That the culture has lost its way. That today's pop stars are uniquely plastic, uniquely talentless, uniquely reprehensible. That the nadir is now.
But pop music never really changes all that much. It's catchy and romantic and adolescent. Sometimes it's disposable. Sometimes it sticks with you. At its best, a pop song can give you three minutes of pure pleasure without asking all that much in return. Walling yourself off from the possibility of experiencing that kind of escape again and again, in real time, seems like a pretty boring way to live.
Midnight Memories Review
After two albums of flirting, hand-holding and coltish fumbling at parties, One Direction might just have finally gone all the way on their third album, Midnight Memories. Maybe.
There is a track on the deluxe edition – widely disseminated online – called Why Don't We Go There, in which Harry Styles propositions some nubile interlocutor. "We got all night," he reasons, "we're going nowhere/ Why don't you stay?/ Why don't we go… there?" he asks, eyebrow cocked. "If you give in tonight/ Just let me set you free." If you are a squeaky-clean boy band attempting to manage a transition into your 20s, naming your ever-so-slightly-more-grown-up album Midnight Memories, you are probably going to have to acknowledge, somehow, that things happen in the dark other than the nonstop japery of your first album, Up All Night, and all the "going crazy-crazy-crazy till we see the sun" of album number two, Take Me Home. This is not a bad way of going about it: parking a little lust on the deluxe edition.
Then there is the small matter of the vanilla leering, which takes place on the main album. On Little Black Dress, One Direction turn from excellent boyfriend material – caring, devoted, well turned out, easily hurt – to something more akin to one-night-standees. "I wanna see the way you move for me, baby," it goes, as goaty a lyric as these nice boys have ever essayed. Poodle-rock guitars complete the picture of band slipping their hands out of yours and into their trouser pockets. (And what does Louis Tomlinson actually mean when, on Happily, he asks his ex whether her new boyfriend "feels his traces" in her hair?)
Admitting the existence of sex is not the only overt sign of looming maturity on One Direction's third album in three heady years, one that looks certain to cement them as a global phenomenon. The band forecast that Midnight Memories would be "rockier" than their previous efforts, which have largely cleaved fairly close to the bright'n'breezy Swedish school of pop-plus-doe-eyed balladry. And yet that doesn't quite prepare you for the extended soft-rock passages, the Joan Jett-ish thrust of Zayn Malik's Does He Know? or the sheer Van Halen-like bombast of the title track, one of two touring-band anthems ("Way too many people in the Addison Lee!"). Its dynamics seem to be targeting some notional American heartland at least 30 years older than 1D's fanbase.
Lady Gaga struggled a bit to carry off such a major pop-to-rock volte-face on Born This Way, but one of the theories about why Katy Perry is doing so well has something to do with her propensity for guitars. Here, this new taste for Def Leppard comes tempered with some even more grown-up fare: a Mumfords nod, a Police tribute and a flaccid one co-written by Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody (Something Great). Most Directioners will already have heard the Mumfords-inspired Story of My Life, in which some sort of romantic contretemps finds the boys in a darkroom in the video, developing photographs (a mysterious practice that may have to be explained to their fanbase). The catchy Diana, meanwhile, is a naked rewrite of at least three songs of some vintage, not least Don't Stand So Close to Me.
Given how Miley Cyrus has handled her transition from teen star to adult material, all eyes are on how these 20-nothing pop powerhouses manage their progression from pecks on the cheeks to kissing with tongues, from scallywaggery to manhood. Ultimately, the vast bulk of Midnight Memories remains emotionally charged rather than carnally inclined, with not a soupçon of R&B anywhere and love songs galore.
What's really significant, though, is that the band are now co-writing greater swaths of their material, and that Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Niall Horan are getting more time on the mic. A lack of democracy and asset-sharing has sunk many a band, never mind a boy band. This album does the job, in more ways than one.
Contact One Direction
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | YouTube | Soundcloud
Contact The Daily Beast
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Contact The Guardian
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Sources : One Direction Photo | Listen To Midnight Memories (Deluxe) | One Direction Article | Midnight Memories (Deluxe) Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Walmart
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