Our continuing look at the closing lines of new music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to This Is Us, the seventh studio album from boy-turned-man band the Backstreet Boys:
• ”The fact the four-piece have roped in the talents of Max Martin (theirs and Britney’s songwriting saviour), RedOne (Lady Gaga’s favourite knob twiddler) and coolster T-Pain, highlight their pop ambitions. And the verdict is: for our sins, we actually quite like it.” [Sarah-Louise James, Daily Star]
• ”But the new disc does mark the band’s return after a decade to its old teen-pop sound, and considering these guys’ combined age, the result is surprisingly unembarrassing. Credit goes in large part to
au courant producers such as T-Pain (’She’s a Dream’), RedOne (’Straight Through My Heart’), and Max Martin (’Bigger’), the group’s original Svengali. The strong vocals certainly don’t hurt
either.” [Mikael Wood, EW]
• ”Of course, it helps that they have a bunch of hooks here, too — hooks that aren’t quite as galvanizing as ‘I Want It That Way,’ but easily eclipsing those on the pedestrian Unbreakable, helping the band seem modern without seeming pandering. It’s a move that the New Kids on the Block couldn’t pull off on their tawdry, sex-obsessed comeback, and it’s one that the Backstreets seemed incapable of doing just a few years ago, but on This Is Us, the group sounds great for their age, and they sound like they’re at their peak — which is no guarantee of a hit, but it sure makes for a better album than they’ve produced in quite a while.” [Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide]
I’m surprised the reviews don’t make a little more of the minor masterpiece that was “Incomplete” — a song every bit as good as anything they recorded in the late ’90s (only “IWITW,” natch, would beat it) and that forced me to take their ‘05 comeback effort seriously. The fact that it fell shy of the U.S. Top 10 had everything to do with the radio landscape they came back into, more than the merits of the song or their performance of it.