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Nov 25, 2013Midnight Memories, the third full-length from the "X Factor"-formed quintet, follows up on what worked best on last year's "Take Me Home," and tosses in some proficient new ideas to keep listeners eager for the band's continued evolution.
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Nov 25, 2013When the album ends and the various styles, songs, and moods are added up, Midnight Memories ends up as another satisfying album that does everything a One D album should do and then some.
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Nov 25, 2013It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.
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Nov 26, 2013As a whole, Midnight Memories isn’t a genre game-changer. But in terms of the One Direction catalog, this record is exactly the right move: There’s enough personality, charm, and dramatic solos to satisfy fans, and enough incremental moves toward artistic credibility to at least give the band a chance at an enduring career.
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Nov 25, 2013Bizarrely, for an album by guys born in the early '90s, it's '80s hard rock that Midnight celebrates.
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Nov 26, 2013Here there are spirited, pitch-perfect replicas of the Who's power-chord bombast ("Best Song Ever"), Van Halen's louche boogie ("Little Black Dress") and Def Leppard's stadium-sized glam ("Midnight Memories").
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Nov 25, 2013Ultimately, the vast bulk of Midnight Memories remains emotionally charged rather than carnally inclined, with not a soupçon of R&B anywhere and love songs galore.
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Nov 25, 2013The tracks may recall "Pour Some Sugar on Me," but their lyrics are still all "I'm not scared of love/'Cause when I'm not with you I'm weaker," so essentially the album's potentially nastiest tracks come off as a glorified Halloween costume act. More believable are the moments when they lay off the hard sell.
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Nov 25, 2013As long as Midnight Memories offers chorus after chorus of Gary Glitter-style fodderstompf, it sounds like the best boy-band album since No Strings Attached.
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Dec 2, 2013They joyfully plunder rock riffs and hip-hop beats, but a logjam of lousy ballads suggests Bryan Adams embodies their ideal of maturity.
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Nov 26, 2013The wildly popular quintet’s third studio album, is buffered to a flawless shine, but along the way they’ve bleached the music of nuance and texture.
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Apr 22, 2014Midnight Memories takes the slight progression of Take Me Home and demolishes it.
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Nov 27, 2013Midnight Memories finds One Direction fumbling the transition with clumsy attempts to adopt ill-fitting rock livery.
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Nov 27, 2013With a couple of exceptions, this is a dimly written album.
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Dec 2, 2013If maturing means 14 (regular edition) tracks of footy-stadium-worthy anthemic choruses ad nauseam, I don’t want 1-D to grow up.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 248 out of 410
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Mixed: 39 out of 410
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Negative: 123 out of 410
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Nov 25, 2013This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Feb 18, 2014
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Nov 25, 2013