Westlife - Back Home

You may not like Westlife but at least try giving this review a chance, please?
So while I was at the mall a while ago, this album came up on shuffle mode. I love Westlife and all but surprisingly I haven't listened to the whole album as a whole in a few months so I kept it on. In the middle of listening to the album(and shopping, duh.), I realized something.

It's album's like this that actually make me proud to be a Westlife fan.

Everyone disses them and I get where they're coming from, with all the sappy ballads and all but you listen to this album and you DON'T get all these ballads. Yes, the two UK singles were ballads and more or less 50% of the album is on the slower side but what about the other half? It's those songs that make me want to tell everyone to give this album a chance. SO, I'll only be reviewing the non-sappy ballad, non-Westlife formula songs.

I'm thankful for the fact that Something Right was at least an Australia/New Zealand single because it gets the song out there and face it, after the Amazing disaster, Sony BMG DID NOT want to sell that little on a Westlife single. This is the pop that should be making the rounds, this is the pop that should get noticed more because there are people like me who missed the early 2000's pop boom. Aside from that it's an outright amazing song, even Poster Girl seems to think so!

When I'm With You is slow, but it's got a different sound so it qualifies. Out of the whole album, this was the song that stuck me right from the start. Not Home, not Something Right, not any other song, this was this one that made me go 'wow'. It seems like a lot of recent pop group albums(how many pop groups are there at the moment?) have this one R&B track, regardless of their musical direction. If I was naive enough I'd say it was to try and break the US but we all know what happened to Westlife(two years worth of promotion around the country and what did they get? One US top 30 I think, a TRL top ten video and a bubbling under chart album..) so I wouldn't keep my hopes up. Still, it's got an amazing beat and the stunning verses make up for the not so hot chorus.

Catch My Breath has been a fan favorite from the very start and to me it's like an updated and more mature version of TGF(While still in high school, Shane and Mark wrote Together Girl Forever for Shane's childhood sweetheart and now wife, Gillian, Kian Egan's cousin! haha. They recorded the song as IOU and sold like 2,000 copies..). Seriously! It sounds like Shane + Gill's love story, at least that's what I get from the interviews and the books. It's modern chart music, pop but not pop and that's what I love about it.

The Easy Way is very Motown-esque, heck they even mixed it with ABC(the Jackson 5 song?) during last year's tour(I didn't like the choreography though..)! So anyway, this is probably the fastest song on the album to they deserve some praise for not only giving us an uptempo but an amazing melody as well! It's catchy and everyone gets to sing! yay! haha.

The last song that really made me want to listen to this album and shove it in the haters' faces was Pictures In My Head. If you remember their third album World Of Our Own, there was a track on it called Why Do I Love You. If you've heard it, good, if you haven't, listen to it here. Now think of that song plus Catch My Breath and you get Pictures In My Head. It's got the most stunning melody and most of all, it's not a sappy ballad! This was the song that appeared on my iPod and this was the song that got me to write this whole thing, it's brilliant.

So there, is that enough proof that there's more to Westlife than sitting on stools and singing all these cheesy ballads? haha it better be.

The Rating: 5/5. duh!