These days, 90s boybands are finding a way to transition smoothly to fortysomething manbands by avoiding the high notes and ensuring that someone is always wearing a waistcoat. Combined with the fizz of nostalgia, this formula means that Backstreet Boys have pulled off an 80-date Las Vegas residency that has made an estimated $34m and they are gearing up for their biggest world tour in two decades.
It would be easy for a group with such saccharine hits as I Want It That Way to come off like <person>Peter Pans</person> trapped in pop’s unforgiving amber, but their new album positions them as family men who will give you a good spanking. And so there is No Place, in which they become a five-man <person>Charlie Puth</person> and star in a sentimental video with their wives and children. And then there are also the pseudo-Fifty Shades soundtrack jams such as New Love, which seem insensitive considering the rape allegation made last year against <person>Nick Carter</person> concerning an incident in 2003. He denied the allegation, and the case was dropped. But you do wonder why the same didn’t happen to a song with such lyrics as: “Who are you, the sex police? / My sex ain’t got no rules.”
Elsewhere, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart smacks of the Weeknd’s self-loathing R&B, while Is It Just Me is merely Purpose-era <person>Justin Bieber</person>, written by the same guy, <person>Josh Gudwin</person> (weirder still when you consider that in the 90s <person>Nick Carter</person> was the proto-Bieber). This, the band suggests, is what is in Backstreet’s new DNA: well-manicured music that cannily plunders contemporary chart sounds and plonks a pitch-perfect harmony on them. Are they original? Not any more, but world domination awaits anyway.