“Diana” is a masterful piece of popcraft that offers up the most validating couplet in boy band history: “You don’t even know me / But I can feel you crying.” “Best Song Ever,” equally superb, is about a girl who walked “through the doors and past the guards” and left with the heart of a figurative prince/band member. With the help of a lot of double and triple entendres, “Midnight Madness” is one album to the ears of innocents and another album to everybody else. The older the fan, the broader the definition of “it,” but “Midnight Memories” has that covered. Underneath, there are coded lyrics aimed squarely at the legions of young Directioners that serve as reassurance that the boys are still the same approachable moppets they always were: Don’t worry, we’re still saving it for you. On the surface, it’s a conventionally catchy pop album about love lost and found, about never giving up because your heart can love again. Like any mega-album aimed at tweens, “Midnight Memories” must exist on several levels. So many things we don’t know: Who might be the first to unwisely go solo? To be hospitalized for “exhaustion”? Which one is the Justin Timberlake? There’s the one who had a halfhearted romance with Taylor Swift. Despite years of exposure, the members’ individual personalities aren’t as fully fixed (at least in American minds) as they might be. They’re also little more than a cuteness delivery system with interchangeable parts, which is the sort of thing that should worry the band. The ratio of good songs to inoffensive filler is refreshingly high, though 1D has yet to place a song on Boy Band Mount Rushmore alongside “I Want It That Way” and “End of the Road.” These boys have never made a great song, which is the sort of thing that should worry pop-culture historians. One Direction members are credited with co-writing nearly every track, the songs are expertly made, impressively (sometimes very impressively) sung, nominally more adult and in every way quite decent, which is all they need to be. “Midnight Memories” faithfully executes its third-album duties. The third album is the one where the group asserts its independence from handlers, professes a greater interest in writing its own songs and experiments with PG-13 subject material and a more mature sound.Įverything usually starts falling apart after that. The second album (“ Take Me Home,” 2012) is a careful re-staging of the first album, which solidifies the band’s reign. But once it starts, it always goes the same way: The first album (“ Up All Night,” 2011) is the out-of-nowhere breakthrough. These boys began as contestants on the British version of “The X Factor” (finishing in third place) instead of being forged in Lou Pearlman’s Orlando Finishing School in the manner of obvious ancestors Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. Years from now, we’ll look back on One Direction’s third release, “ Midnight Memories,” as the band’s last album before everything was ruined.Įverybody knows that One Direction is simply the latest bunch of boys in a long line of boys - young men with no pedigree, lots of charm and just enough talent, a lineage that stretches back to the Monkees.