Anyone want a slightly used night?
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[3.22]
Scott Mildenhall: A thousand Wanted clones in a nitespot setting, all raising their glasses to an off-mic rallying call of “hold your jars!” The Banter Battalion. The Bantalion, in fact, putting the #decent into indecent, and probably with the hashtag included. It might seem such satire couldn’t possibly have been written, but it was, and by someone other than Simon & Ruess, apparently with the genuine intent of pofacedly valorising the actions of self-appointed legends as they set off on a night out: a land to be conquered. All that can be done is to take the positive: it’s a reminder that there is poetry and beauty in everything, even lad banter. Somewhere.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: All-together-now hollering rarely sounds so joyless.
[2]
Alfred Soto: More stacked chants and accordion hooks, the sugar around the bitter self-help pill. The five leches who recorded “Glad You Came” are the type who should give girls advice.
[2]
Will Adams: Creatively bankrupt in every sense, from the mid-tempo chugga-chug to the aspirations for eternal party-glory to the roaring men’s chorus. Notable only for its comedic value at the gravestone bit.
[2]
Brad Shoup: Heyyyyyy. I’m a little drunk but I got summa to say. The floor recognizes the gentleman from Literally Anywhere! The floor can wait to be thoroughly mopped and disinfected. Yeah, we’ve turned just-lads into the stuff of VFW bullshitting sessions, and injected “Some Nights” with Matt Redman’s supplicating croon. The result is fairly fantastic: a puked-up patina of glory coating an awful night of boy-being. “We Own the Night” wants anthem status but feels faintly ridiculous for it — or am I falling for the asshole yet again?! I mean, would I let anyone else rhyme “night” with itself this many times?
[8]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Starts out sounding like a take on a Hogmanay standard or zydeco or even cumbia — you expect the solemn intro to morph into something rambunctious and celebratory. However, The Wanted would rather make meditations on celebration, on sex, on drinking, without ever giving you the dizziness of what it feels like to carry out any of those acts. So here is “We Own the Night,” a sloth-speed shanty about crafting your dumbass party legacy with THE LADS, a navel-gazing toast that runs overlong and just won’t stop.
[1]
Iain Mew: When legend-man passes on and isn’t around to keep the party going, what does the party want to have on its tombstone?? I would be more interested in that answer than in the sad lad beer ad soundtrack-in-waiting they actually provide.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: They can’t sing, they can’t dance, but who cares? They roar like Nate Ruess.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: I half admire the sheer gall with which they put forward their prefab elegiac vision of Achilles as the most righteous kegger dude. Add that to the fact that they finally sound like a boy band — Take That’s pseudo-profundity and Westlife’s cheap sentimentalism are all over this fake-Irish bollocks — and it’s something I almost wouldn’t mind hearing again.
[5]