Up All Night (2012)

Music groups don't come with much less street cred than this: After failing individually in auditions for the U.K.'s X Factor in 2010, five teen crooners were slapped together by judge Simon Cowell into an insta-band that made it to the show's finals with wobbly-cute renditions of well-trod classics like ''Your Song'' and ''Forever Young.'' (They got third place.) But One Direction have something else: They're the first viable next-gen boy band for a tween demographic that knows Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC only as golden oldies. (Just ask British teens, who have already sent Up All Night up the charts overseas.) Those acts are clear touchstones, from OD's style — think Nick Carter's scarf-wearing foreign-exchange-student cousins — to their music, which melds five-part harmonies and prefab production. Still, Up All Night marches to a new, postmillennial tiger beat: The irresistibly bouncy ''One Thing,'' the Kelly Clarkson-co-penned ''Tell Me a Lie,'' and the party-till-Mom-comes-home title track are all charmingly gimmick-free slices of white-bread wonder. And insofar as a group of five near-strangers can have a personality, OD's is likably low-key: They're just a band of impeccably coiffed blokes who want nothing more than to ''be your life, your voice, your reason to be,'' but don't want to make a ''mess upon your innocence.'' (Yuck.) Lyrics like that — and forgettable tracks like the hormone-marinated ballad ''Save You Tonight'' — won't help the group earn much respect in music circles. But if a tween-pop empire is what these boys are after, they're definitely headed in the right direction. B+