One Direction - Up All Night - Album Review

Up All Night

One Direction

Sony Music

Rating 4/5

Reviewed by Tori Hyland

One Direction seems to be the name on every teenage girl’s tongue. Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson all auditioned for the seventh series of The X Factor (UK) individually before being rejected and forming One Direction coming third overall. Now having released their debut album Up All Night and gaining over one million likes on their Facebook page, are these five good looking young boys bringing boy bands back?

Up All Night begins with their debut single, What Makes You Beautiful. A very alive beginning that could just have you dancing within a matter of seconds. Then moving into the other released singles; ballad Gotta Be You and upbeat One Thing.

The album’s track list is a bit unusual, almost like a heartbeat displayed on a monitor. Up and down. You’ll be listening to an upbeat positive track then next it will drop into a slower softer song, which can get annoying.

Advancing into the slower mid-section which focuses more upon negative aspects of relationships and love. Starting with standout track, More Than This which moves into the energetic and happy title track, a song that does seem a tad lost amongst the surrounding adverse tracks. It’s quite common for an album to deteriorate as the album progresses but that certainly isn’t the case for Up All Night.

This brings us to track eight, Taken, the softest song of the lot and definitely takes the win of my personal favourite. Why? Simply because of the emotion in the song specifically heard through their voices. It’s very acoustic based and sounds individual.

Finally advancing to the home run of Up All Night, the album seems to turn sour; it begins to get boring and similar. Luckily the album concludes on a high with the unusual lively song, Stole My Heart. Why the song is different becomes hard to explain, I think it’s mainly because of the vivid mental image of a romance in a club or party I get, which makes it so special.

There’s no doubt One Direction have talent to match those cute faces, they definitely can sing and harmonise with each other’s voices perfectly. Gotta Be You is a clear example of showing off their harmonies as well as specifically demonstrating Harry Style’s diverse vocal range.

I think what does put One Direction in the picture is firstly their songs are insanely catchy and addictive! Secondly their music is aimed towards teenage girls. We saw it in the 1960’s with The Beatles’ ‘Bealtemania’ and we saw it now with Justin Bieber’s ‘Bieber Fever’, girls go crazy for young attractive boys who play music and sing about love!

Up All Night has a relatively balance between upbeat and softer songs, and both styles suit them very nicely. It starts on a high and finishes on a high. The only disappointment in the album the fact that some worthy songs like Na Na Na and Another World which had accompanied singles on the release, were not included into the album and could have brightened and supplied the album with more upbeat songs.

Whether you like it or not, Up All Night is going to be dancing around your head.   

http://www.onedirectionmusic.com/

One Thing