Album Review

One Direction – Up All Night

• 4th Dec 2011

The cobbled-together quintet of barely pubescent boys of X Factor fame released debut album ‘Up All Night’ which had instant success. The album is a reasonable effort for a first attempt.

Yes, the first single ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ deserves the gargantuan success it had, for the fact that it is a perfect punchy pop-rock single, which the album is full of. Kelly Clarkson eat your heart out. However, the rest of the album is more a collection of One Direction singing other people’s songs – most noticeably those that stand out from being by Ed Sheeran and Tom from McFly (the one that isn’t doing any reality TV at the moment).

It is essentially an album of 15 radio-friendly, 15 year old girl friendly pop songs, and although they sound like Backstreet Boys and Tom Petty sicked up in a tasty sandwich, it is (rather like Liam, Zayn, Harry, Louis and Niall) so resolutely perky it is the musical equivalent of dimples.

For a group of lads that were all of the Bieber generation, there is a huge emphasis on the ladies in this album – how to win them, how they lost them and personal favourite lyric – what a mess they made upon your innocence. Well I never…

There are a few too many ballads on here, not that a ballad is a bad thing, ‘Gotta Be You’ the current single is good, but that ‘Same Mistakes’ and ‘I Wish’ seem a bit boring in comparison. ‘Stole My Heart’ which sounds scarily familiar to fans of Taio Cruz brings back the pop-rock sound once again, and are guaranteed to fill the dance floors at under-16 discos across the country.

The album has more bark than bite, but having said that I am about ten years off their target audience, and in a sixteen year olds’ mind I would love it.