STUCK RECORDS

Backstreet Boys – ‘This Is Us’
UK Release 5/10/09 (RCA)

The Backstreet Boys seem perilously caught in pop’s twilight zone. Their comeback since 2005 has spanned almost as long as their original chart-topping turn-of-the-century reign. Yet it’s been a slippery slope, 2007’s ‘Unbreakable’ album was their lowest charting in both America (#7) and the UK (#21). In response, ‘This Is Us’ drafts in a raft of known hitmakers, namely RedOne (Lady GaGa), T-Pain, Printz Board (Black Eyed Peas), Brian Kennedy (Jennifer Hudson) and of course Max Martin to resurrect the “classic” Backstreet Boys sound. And it almost succeeds.

First single ‘Straight Through My Heart’ kicks things off in typical pop fashion – by likening love to fatal violence (“straight through my heart, a single bullet got me, I can’t stop the bleeding”) and delivering macabre descriptions of blood drenched clothes with about as much conviction as the BT speaking clock. Yet, this is an album where nothing sticks for longer than four minutes. Take track three: ‘Bye Bye Love’, where the group decides that relationships really aren’t their thing anyway, as they ponder: “I think I wanna stay single, baby we’re better apart” over euphoric, high energy processed beats. Just a few seconds later, ‘All Of Your Life (You Need Love)’ finds the Backstreet Boys promising truth, honesty and “a shield from rain or weather”, decrying the very men that were singing the previous song. You’ve probably met goldfish with longer-term memories; such is the recurrent lyrical attention deficit disorder on the album. The next single ‘Bigger’ does a decent job updating the group’s classic ballad style into present day (no coincidence, since it happens to be the only Max Martin track) with an intro reminiscent of a sped up ‘Chasing Cars’. Certainly, it would be the group’s best chance of scoring a bona fide hit single, although the likelihood is that such a chance has now come and gone. Elsewhere the slower numbers descend into laughable unlikeliness. ‘She’s A Dream’ is an ode to (one presumes) a vagrant woman who doesn’t have access to television, radio or magazines to know she’s dating one of the Backstreet Boys. Meanwhile ‘Shattered’ may as well be prefixed ‘Drowning, part II’ such is the production similarity. Throughout the album however, the harmonies remain slick, effortless and heartfelt, no matter how absurd the lyrics.

Of course, this being a throwback to the turn of the century, ‘This Is Us’ also finds itself saddled with the odd filler track. ‘PDA’ misguidedly veers into the tango before descending into a ridiculous chorus encouraging women to allow their “booty” to be felt up “in the club, the restaurant, the grocery store, or the movies”. The group come across as perverse chauvinists, besides the fact that no-one outside of the cast of Gossip Girl uses the acronym. It also feels worth mentioning the title track, since Wyclef Jean claimed it could change music. Maybe something was lost in the final mix, because whilst it’s certainly not the worst song on the album, it’s about as groundbreaking as a pneumatic drill during a power cut. The smattering of vocodered ad libs actually serve to make the song feel overbaked, whilst the melody itself is hummable, but nowhere near as satisfying as ‘I Want It That Way’, the milestone it’s supposed to be succeeding.

All of the above leave this a difficult album to sum up. If you are a Backstreet Boys fan, chances are you’ll be buying regardless. If you’ve not listened to the group since their heyday, then this is the best of their three albums post-comeback in terms of embracing what made them popular in the first place. But in the context of pop music in 2009, it really doesn’t fit anywhere, sounding irrelevant and at times, dated. The lyrics can be offensively nonsensical and the sincerity in the delivery of the ballads is lost in the anti-relationship uptempos. Despite starting to sound like a parody of their former selves, it’s also where the Backstreet Boys seem most comfortable. ‘This Is Us’ is almost the extreme antithesis of previous attempts to mature their sound and in truth; we probably wouldn’t have them any other way.

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Craig Herman