Album Of The Week: 5 Seconds Of Summer & their self-titled

To be honest this isn't just my album of this week, it's been my album of every week since it's been released, which was on June 27th (sidenote: I had to look the date up and it slightly shocked me because it feels like the album just dropped two days ago).
It also slightly annoys me how people mock this band just because they're four teenage boys who are currently opening for One Direction. First: Who cares and second: why does that bother you so much? I could rant about this for the next ten years, so let's move on to the actual album.

The band's most popular song, She Looks So Perfect, opens the record with a nice riff and  the story of a girl wearing American Apparel underwear - the lyrics might not be the deepest you'll ever come across, but it's most likely not the goal of this song to make you question all of your life choices.

Don't Stop, song number two, picks up the atmosphere of SLSP and convinces with catchy tunes and a good mood. 

Apologies to whoever cares, but I usually skip song munber three: Good Girls. I'm just not really feeling the sound of it and the story behind it doesn't really impress me either (I mean, good girls are bad girls that haven't been caught might be an existing thing, but in my opinion it's not something that delivers a good base for a song.)

What I'm extremely happy about is the fact that Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low helped the boys with a few songs (if you want to play a game called "guess the Alex songs", I highly encourage you to do so, you'll definitely hear it): Kiss Me Kiss Me is one of them. I don't know what it is, but Alex has this musical fingerprint so to speak which he leaves in every song he writes, and he didn't miss this one either. It kind of reminds me of All Time Low's Nothing Personal era.

When I first got into 5sos, I already knew they were probably young (aka younger than me), but I hadn't expected their vocalist to be 17 (he's 18 in the meantime, but still), and their oldest member is their drummer who's 20 now. Obviously this age thing brings a few difficulties sometimes, so the boys wrote a song about it: 18. I don't think I have to say much about this one, just pay some attention to the lyrics and you'll see the difficulties I'm talking about.
After a handful of rather fast and loud songs, the guys show that they can be quiet as well: Everything I Didn't Say and Beside You deal with the flip side of being a touring musician. I can only imagine what it feels like to drop off your special one at the airport and let him travel the world while you sit at home and wait for him (mad respect for all the couples who actually manage this).
End Up Here puts an end to the sad mood: it's fast, it's catchy and it contains fantastic vocals. The story behind it makes me chuckle every single time because it's basically about the loser boy who gets to be with the fantastic girl who is so out of his league that his friends suggest he should lock her down before she can run. I'm pretty sure that it's the other way around in the meanwhile.
Another Alex-song is coming up and I definitely see and hear All Time Low perform this one as well: Long Way Home comes with a mental music video right away (at least I immediately see a couple driving around aimlessly for hours just so they can be together. So, if anybody connected to 5sos is reading this right now, I'll gladly play a role in this video if you ever decide to make one). 

Heartbreak Girl was the very first song of 5sos I ever heard and it's one of my favourites ever since. I'm not gonna start a feminist rant about the ridiculous concept of being "friendzoned" now, so let's just say that the song is good regardless of the topic.

English Love Affair might be the song that made the fandom speculate the most. Who is this English love affair? And who is the lucky boy who got involved? I heard a few rumours concerning these questions, but I won't discuss them here. If you'd like to share your opinions, hit me up!

Their current single Amnesia was written by the Madden brothers and I just love it. Y'all know that I'm a sucker for acoustic songs, so this song is super important. Both Luke and Calum are really talented vocalists, and I think their voices can shine even more than usual in this song (another sidenote: Michael and Ashton have amazing voices as well and sometimes it makes me sad that they don't get to sing more often).

Michael does some vocals in Social Casualty but this one and the next song (Never Be) are unfortunately filed under: songs I skip. I don't know what's my problem with Social Casualty, but Never Be is too slow for my taste, it lacks a little energy. The chorus is amazing actually, but I'm not feeling the rest.

However, Voodoo Doll is one of my favourites as well. When I got into this band it was like this: my best friend introduced me to them, I had no idea who was who and kept mixing up Luke and Ashton, I listened to Out Of My Limit and I was sold. Since then I feel like there's some higher force keeping me here even though I sometimes wish I didn't know them (my bank account would definitely be happier).

Kudos to you if you read all of this, but I just really like this album, so I thought every song deserved a little something. In all honesty, it makes me angry when people are all mean and mock this band because this is their first full-length album and it's already pretty amazing, so I'm quite excited to see where this whole thing is going. Also it's lame to say that only teenage girls enjoy this album because boys can like this just as much and it's not very punk rock to keep yourself from listening to a certain band because some people associate them with One Direction.