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One Direction’s new album, Four, is the best fourth album in the short but exhaustively documented modern history of boy bands.
This isn’t necessarily saying much, because no boy band has ever made a great fourth album.
Many don’t even get to four; ’N Sync never did. For others, No. 4 is the post-reunion album, the one you make when you’re broke and old, to justify the reunion tour.
For those that stay together, the fourth album is the one where the members try to hold it all together, to paper over the divide between the band you used to be — the one the tweens liked — and the multi-headed hydra of ambition, ego, boredom and beginning-to-be-worrisome substance abuse that you are now.
At worst, it’s an unwitting portrait of a band’s internal collapse. At best, it’s a temporary barrier erected against looming irrelevance.
The Backstreet Boys made a decent fourth album (2000’s Black & Blue), but they are statistical boy band anomalies — disciplined workhorses who managed to never embarrass themselves. The same can’t be said of New Edition: The group’s No. 4 was a concept album.
One Direction does not get nearly enough credit for simply avoiding the difficulties of its forefathers.
The band does not seem contemptuous of its fan base and does not insist on singing “serious message” songs about various societal ills.
It has never made a Christmas album. The boy band does a lot right by not doing much wrong.
It’s hard to be a good boy band and even harder to stay one, but Four is almost everything it could be.
It takes the big, bright, very American guitar sound of 1D’s third album, 2013’s Midnight Memories, a little further, while de-emphasizing, but still honouring, its Velveeta beginnings.
It mixes Mumford & Sons featherweight folk and easy-listening 1980s arena rock, two things which somehow do not sound as terrible together as they do separately.
The members of One Direction — who now average about 21 — are too young for these middle-of-the-road rock songs and too old for the bushytailed pop songs that made their fortunes. The songs with folk underpinnings best fit their voices — gorgeous in the aggregate and unexceptional alone — but not their personalities, which are not yet suited for gentle reflection.
Boy band albums are like Russian nesting dolls, each one a smaller, more diminished but otherwise identical version of the one before.
Four makes all the same noises as its predecessors, reuses all the same sentiments but never sparks. It is painstakingly made, the harmonies are lovely and the hooks are hook-y, but it still feels obligatory.
The first single, Steal My Girl, is a wan version of more electric past hits such as Best Song Ever.
Stockholm Syndrome, a probably inadvisable ode to being held captive by an eager girl (“I know they’ll be coming to find me soon / But I fear I’m getting used to being held by you”), is fan-fic brought to life.
There are a handful of smart wouldbe singles: Fool’s Gold and Where Do Broken Hearts Go are seamless pop perfection, and Girl Almighty sounds like a pretty decent modern-day Monkees song, but it’s an outlier.
The members of One Direction remain the musical embodiment of the Ryan Gosling Hey Girl meme — limpid, malleable, sensitive, here for you. This is good for the brand: Once boy bands start getting older and less controllable, message discipline is half the battle.
Most of the tracks on Four may be more sonically mature, more interested in rock than in sugary pop, but the lyrics, many of which are credited to the band members themselves, are as innocent and puppyish as ever.
Four spends a lot of time trying to stave off the inevitable.
There are a telling number of songs about the fear of getting older (such as 18, co-written by frequent collaborator Ed Sheeran, and Night Changes, both sleepy ballads), about wishing things could go back to the way they were, or stay the same.
It’s too early for fans to get nostalgic about One Direction’s golden era (that’s due to kick at some point in the summer of 2015), but the group’s members, perhaps sobered by the weathered visages and cratered sales of the Jonas Brothers, seem to spend time onstage and off contemplating the fleeting glories of life in a boy band.