All About One Direction

Take Me Home Details Part V: Critical Reception

     The album received generally positive reviews from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 69, based on nine reviews. Despite its "boardroom-defined objectives" and "safety", Al Fox, writing for BBC Music, considered the music itself "notable quality" and reliable. Matt Collar from Allmusic described it as an "immediately catchy mix of dancey pop that maximizes the group's shared lead-vocal approach and peppy, upbeat image." Kate Wills from The Independent praised the uptempo material while defining the ballads as jarring, a notion shared by John Dolan of Rolling Stone. 

    Although he dubbed it "actually pretty great – certainly better than it needs to be," Sam Lansky for Idolator thought the album is predictably generic, and interpreted it as "a little cynical, even as it excels in making some of the purest pop of the year."

    Entertainment Weekly writer Adam Markovitz panned the record as an empty gesture and asserted that the album was rushed, signifying an album with "barely enough zip to keep the kids up past dinner." Likewise, Robert Copsey from Digital Spy wrote, "The result [of Take Me Home] may see them progressing at a snail's pace, but when you've got it so good, what's the rush anyway?" In a mixed review, The New York Times contributor Jon Caramanica appreciated the album's sonic palette, but dismissed its lyricism as narrow and tedious, and Sheeran's contributions as "unusually lumpy in the hands of such a polished group".

    Caramanica characterised the members' vocals as "fundamentally interchangeable", and opined that only Zayn Malik "breaks free from the pack vocally with any regularity."

   While he commended the album for its "variable quality", Alexis Petridis for The Guardian felt the record would not be able to transcend its target market, a core audience aged approximately 8 to 12 and female: "To anyone else, the mystery of One Direction's success – or at least the sheer scale of it – remains as opaque as ever."

      The latter view was shared by Ben Rayner of the Toronto Star: "Unless you’re in the target demographic or are, perhaps, a mom who lived through the same thing in her youth, there's no point in even going near this record, of course, but the rest of us were never meant to in the first place." Writing for HitFix, Melinda Newman maintained that the album "masterfully hits its target", and concluded as follows: "I’m so far out of the One Dimension demographic, I practically need a GPS to find it."