Album Review: The Wanted – Word of Mouth
3 min read
UK ‘s bad boy band, The Wanted, are back with their third studio album Word of Mouth. Whilst they may not have attracted quite as much attention as fellow UK boy band One Direction, Max George, Nathan Sykes, Tom Parks, Jay McGuinness and Siva Kaneswaran definitely have a large fan base of their own with over 9 million singles sold worldwide.
Word of Mouth has been two years in the making since The Wanted’s last album Battleground. This was partly due to a few mishaps along the way, including the change of release date and band member Nathan Sykes needing surgery on his throat.However, the band believe this has made them and their music better than ever, and have promoted Word of Mouth through their reality television show ‘The Wanted Life’ and by releasing five tracks early as singles.
The album gets off to an underwhelming start. We Own The Night doesn’t get you pumped up as it should; it sounds like you should be winding down before anything even starts. This does not bode well for the rest of the album. The following tracks In The Middle and Running Out of Reasons are your typical, cliche boy band pop songs. They are rather forgetable tracks and seem like fillers more than anything.
However, the boys find success with two of the tracks they released as singles, I Found You and Show Me Love (America). I Found You is the definition of a good pop song: it’s got a great beat, it’s catchy and manages to stand out from the rest of the generic pop songs. Show Me Love (America) was an extremely popular single and it’s easy to see why. This track shows off the boys fantastic vocal range and is an emotionally charged pop ballad.
After my brief excitement and happiness with the two above songs, I found myself unimpressed with the next few songs offered. Another single, Walks Like Rihanna is an attempt to make a hit song by name dropping one of the world’s biggest pop stars. It doesn’t work. When you look at the lyrics, it’s actually a little insulting: “She can’t sing, she can’t dance, but who cares, she walks like Rihanna!” If I was the girl they were singing about, I’d be a little insulted. I was also very disappointed with the next song, Summer Alive. The lyrics are cliche, it sounds like your typical generic pop song and it sounds like it was definitely a filler song.
But things started to look up again for the second half of the album. In particular, the song Glow In The Dark caught my attention. Sure the lyrics are a little cheesy (“You glow in the dark”) but the dub-step like dance break and catchy melody brings something different to the album that we haven’t heard from The Wanted before.
The album finishes on a high, with the song Everybody Knows. Whilst the album has a few hits and misses when it comes to ballads, Everybody Knows definitely shines. It has a great melody, great vocals, and it’s so emotion filled that you actually care about what they’re singing about.
Overall, Word of Mouth has some goddies and baddies. But it’s definitely worth a listen, even if you only want to check out a few songs.
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