One Direction's "Midnight Memories" Reviewed

If Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, referred to as One Direction worth with had thought it through, they would have cut at least eight tracks off this 18 song behemoth, kept it to 8 songs, 10 at most, 30 ,inutes so their teenage fans could keep it in heavy rotation and never far from a good strong, and slimmed it down, skipped the excess, kept it as light as their voices and had a chart topping smash.

The problem with Midnight Memories is that what makes them beautiful is their light touch boyishness and while they will, and do grow up a bit, these are standard issue pop rock for their target and less would be much more. Who can listen to 1D for an hour or rah rah pop blasts, with no dance, no EDM, no NSYNC whatsoever? It isn’t that it is samey, though it is samey, it is is that it gets to be boring, and it goes on and on and because you have to wait an hour between songs, the songs can’t hook hard enough.

Utilitarian in the extreme, it is an overbearing drag with lousy lyrics and embarrassing  looks under the covers. Of the 18 songs there are maybe 6 goodies and two greaties and that would be more than enough on a reasonably sized album, but this behemoth is so large there is half an hour between the lyrical self-portrait “Don’t Forget Where You Belong” and the catchy rocker come on “Why Don’t We There” -two slices of distilled naughtiness which should have anchored a normally sized rock album and not this brick of songs for everyone.

One Direction had the right idea (so does Justin Bieber), releasing 5 songs on the weeks leading up to the album. One at a time and not in a stew of 1D testerone, the songs improve. It the midst of this heavily mediocre to poor album, if the song is good, say the witty “Best Song Ever” and the sharp as hell “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” rip “Diana” is lost in the numbers.

ID had the potential to be a perfect pop rock product but it isn’t and the the reason is, they should have banked a lot of these deep album cuts, the world could live very happily without the title track, or the atrocious “You & I” or the lame “Strong”.

Cmon guys, you ain’t Prince, where’s the quality control?

Grade: C+