Dudes, I’m gonna be real with you up front: This is not going to be an ironic review. I love One Direction. One Direction and I have the most beautiful and sincere relationship that a 22-year-old train wreck and five wealthy, adorable British boys can have: I drunkenly beg them via Twitter to come over and drink PBR with me, and they ignore me.
So yeah, I’ve heard their new album Take Me Home. And yeah, maybe I drank a bottle (or two) of wine and said I was “LIVETWEETING THIS BITCH.” Who are you to judge? Who amongst us wouldn’t do the same?
Essentially, Take Me Home is a continuation of their first album, Up All Night, spine-crushing pop music of the highest caliber; the kind of music you find yourself accidentally dancing naked to in front of your open window as people stumble by on their way home from “real” parties with “real” friends.
What? That never happened. (It did.)
We open this magnum opus with “Live While We’re Young,” a YOLO-esque ballad for living in the moment. I already find myself screaming this song directly into my roommate’s face every hour, on the hour, so I know it’s rad as hell. “Kiss You” is another hyper-upbeat song with another guitar riff that sounds like it’s from Grease. I find it strange that Harry Styles sings, “If you don’t wanna take it slow, if you just wanna take me home, baby say yeahhh,” since I explicitly invited him to my house last week to laugh at the One Direction fan fiction on Tumblr and got NO RESPONSE. WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING DEAL, STYLES? I’M GETTING MIXED MESSAGES HERE. I HAVE TO SAY “YEAAHH?” WELL THEN, YEAH. YEAH. YEAH. OKAY? CAN YOU COME OVER NOW? I THINK CLUELESS IS ON NETFLIX.
“Little Things” is one of those songs about the girl thinking she’s ugly and the guy saying she should think she’s beautiful because he thinks she’s beautiful, and it’s whatever I’m not gonna make a complaint about it, except to say: “You still have to squeeze into your jeans?!” DUDE, don’t tell people that I literally have to use a shoehorn to put on my pants- I told you that in confidence!
And, okay, I’m not naïve. I know what “Let me be the first to take it all the way like this” means. But what the FUCK does “Let me be your last first kiss” mean? I don’t know, it sounds vaguely threatening to me. “Yeah, you like that kiss? IT’S ABOUT TO BE YOUR LAST.”
If I had to make a real assessment of this album, I’d say it’s completely frontloaded, with their heavy hitting pop singles in the beginning and their boring mid-tempo songs at the end. But who cares, right? This is perfectly constructed pop music at its most perfectly constructed. Listen to it only if you love life and fun and happiness and abusively one-sided relationships with boy band members.
But really, Harry Styles, I just want you to let me be your last first kiss.
– Brennin Cummings