Liam Payne recently lamented that when One Direction’s management realised he was the sensible one, they made him keep his bandmates in check. Getting cast as Mr Boring was annoying, he explained, yielding him the least screams from fans. Happily for Payne, solo freedom has let him reap maximum screams and embrace his officiousness: with 3.7bn streams, he is the most commercially popular 1D member.
It’s hard to see why. Despite LP1’s effortful attempts to cast Payne as a sexual piranha, the 26-year-old generally comes off as an uptight scold. On Hips Don’t Lie, he stares at a woman’s groin as she dances and warns that she’d better not be wasting his time. “I hope your hips don’t lie unless they’re lying with me,” he sings, a conclusion so deathly it feels like a funeral for reproduction. The thrumming Rude Hours finds him inviting a lady to a “parking lot”. “Might be a bad idea,” he admits, “I’ll probably do your ass in the car.” But never let it be said that Payne is boring and responsible: “Key unlocks the door, ticket on the floor.” If it’s a pay and display, there’ll be murder if it’s not clearly visible. Stack It Up is halfway between a 2003 50 Cent single and the Tory manifesto: “If you wanna stack it up,” he advises, “you gotta work for it.”
Such are the accidental highs of an album empty of intentional humour, heart, or anything much human at all beyond base carnality. Its generic trap and Latin-tinged production and its many guest rappers suggest Payne is trying to keep pace with Drake and the Weeknd. He can’t, because his rank randiness lacks the sense of guilty pleasure that makes his Canadian contemporaries irresistible. The simmering Both Ways, about a woman who loves threesomes, finds him and her “sharing that body like it’s our last meal”, like cheetahs at a carcass. On Familiar, he admires a lady who’s “shaped like a model or some kind of bottle” – Orangina? Ketchup? Perhaps this leg-crossing horror show is another sign of Payne’s prudence: LP1 is a terrible pop album, but very effective contraception.
