One Direction: Take Me Home – review

It's not often you encounter a new album that you can genuinely describe as phenomenal, but the adjective fits One Direction's Take Me Home. If it maintains the quintet's current upward trajectory, they have every right to call themselves the biggest group in the world. Given that, in the US, its lead single, Live While We're Young, had the biggest opening-week sales figures for any non-US act in history, it seems almost inconceivable that it won't.

This is remarkable stuff, not just for a runner-up on The X Factor – who can usually expect about 10 minutes in the spotlight before the siren song of Pontins becomes deafening – but for a UK boyband. The last time anyone broke an artist similar to One Direction over there, their mentor, Simon Cowell, was still prosecuting his business out of a converted lavatory in an NCP car park.

And yet, from the outside, their success looks a little confusing: why, out of the serried ranks of manufactured British hunks, has the US chosen to clasp cheeky-faced Harry Styles to its bosom? If you're not an 11-year-old girl or the long-suffering parent of one, their oeuvre will remain a mystery. You might know their breakthrough hit, What Makes You Beautiful, but could you hum the title track of their debut album, Up All Night? Can you offer any intelligence regarding the Australian Souvenir Edition bonus track Na Na Na?

Close examination of Take Me Home might unlock One Direction's secret. Certainly, anyone who views their mentor and his Syco organisation as pantomime villains doesn't have long to wait for what you might call a bwah-ha-ha moment. Live While We're Young rips off the intro of the Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go? so brazenly it even includes the sound of a plectrum stroking a guitar's muted strings three times between blasts of the riff. In an act of nose-thumbing contempt, it changes literally one note, presumably to avoid having to pay the Clash any royalties.

It's hard to know what's more galling: the degree of brass-balls cynicism on display, or the fact that the result is actually quite good. It introduces Take Me Home's signature style: a peppy, synth-bolstered take on early-80s new-wave pop, heavy on clipped rhythms and chugging guitars, which is at least an improvement on the ersatz R&B that was once the grim lot of the boyband. It also introduces a recurring lyrical motif. If a lot of Take Me Home is concerned with pitching harmless romance at its pubescent audience in a style that's time-honoured to the point of being hackneyed – They Don't Know About Us is essentially Paul Anka's Puppy Love retooled for the BBM generation – other parts of it comprise more of an all-out, crotch-level blitzkrieg than you might expect. Live While We're Young's protagonist is tireless in his determination to "get some", as the song romantically puts it, while Last First Kiss deals with divesting a recalcitrant girl of her maidenhood: "I want to be the first to take it all the way." You do wonder what parents might make of it. Still, as anyone who's read some of the more frenzied One Direction-related Twitter feeds will tell you, it's tame stuff compared to what some weenyboppers are dreaming up of their own accord.

Elsewhere, the material is of variable quality. The chorus of Kiss You is hard to dislodge from your brain,even as said brain is boggling both at the notion it took seven different writers to come up with it, and that one of them is the former lead vocalist of death metal band Blinded Colony . Rock Me, however, is pretty excruciating, as is perhaps inevitable from a song in which teenage boyband members attempt to strike a note of sepia-tinted nostalgia. "Do you remember the summer of 09?" they inquire, begging the response: Yeah, do you? You must have been about eight.

Ed Sheeran contributes two songs, in a pretty canny move on the part of One Direction's management: aligning them with an artist whose fans believe him to be the diametric opposite of a manufactured boyband. Certainly, the forthcoming single Little Things is noticeably more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally than anything else here. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but there's something quite touching about its insistence that flaws are what make a person unique. Alas, his other contribution, Over Again, sounds as if he might have fished it out of the bottom of the bin when he heard One Direction had the chequebook out, perhaps as dish-served-cold revenge on Syco for letting Frankie Cocozza loose with The A-Team during the last series of X Factor.

It isn't bad as albums by boybands go, and doesn't have the awful aura of contemptuous this'll-do common to so much product overseen by One Direction's dark lord and master. Nor, though, is there anything to transcend its target market – a hit so undeniable its appeal will extend far beyond the girls so nutty with lust that they took it as a compliment when Niall Horan called them "a shower of cunts". To anyone else, the mystery of One Direction's success – or at least the sheer scale of it – remains as opaque as ever.