Think of what these songs need to accomplish: They need to give each of the five men a showcase (unlike other boy bands - ahem - this one doesn’t have a blatant frontman, though Mr. It need only be amiable and keep the flame lit. So it’s fine, in a way, if “Midnight Memories” is uninteresting (though it’s not as blank as the group’s last album, “Take Me Home”). In the case of One Direction, which became a Tumblr phenomenon in the wake of its “X Factor” success, and which has had only a handful of genuine hits, not only does demand outpace supply, it may require almost no supply at all. “Midnight Memories” (Syco/Columbia) is its third album, and it establishes how little it takes to keep a global pop phenomenon moving. The credibility of that theory is certainly boosted by the fact that One Direction is easily among the least musically adventurous acts on the pop charts, and among the least sonically ambitious boy bands - that phrase again - in recent memory. The guys are pretty, and maybe that is enough. Whether this is transparent to the squealers that make up the bulk of their fan base is tough to tell. They don’t dance, they’re not particularly enthusiastic, and though their disdain isn’t palpable, their self-awareness always is. They play the part almost resentfully, with the mien of people who know better. And continuing to call One Direction a boy band is simply wrong. Almost from the beginning, its members - Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson - have seemed older than the job required, even though they are just 19 to 21. Cowell was referring to a corollary of the immutable law of boy bands: The band’s fans age, but the band generally does not. “Eventually, they probably will split up and maybe want to have their own careers,” he said, a statement that most likely sent shivers down the tiny spines of One Direction fans but is, of course, merely stating the obvious. In the current issue of Billboard, at the end of the cover feature on One Direction, there is a cooling mist of reality spritzed by, who else, Simon Cowell, the TV judge-impresario who helped Frankenstein this group into existence on the 2010 season of the British version of “The X Factor.”
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