Mixed reviews for Take That's new album This Life

Take That's new album This Life has received mixed reviews from critics.

The band - which includes Droylsden's Howard Donald as a member - released the new recordings after a six year hiatus.

The new album is released ahead of a huge arena tour for the band who arrived on the boyband scene in the early nineties.

However the new album, which sees the band reduced to a trio of Howard, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen, has not been a hit with some critics following its release today.

Adrian Thrills in the Daily Mail awarded This Life three stars out of five and said: "Their first album, Take That & Party, was a dizzy mix of bubblegum pop and disco. Owen describes their latest incarnation as 'a scruffy version of The Three Tenors', although the delicate harmonies and strummed, soft-rock guitars of This Life place them closer to a homespun version of the Eagles, or folk-rock supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash. They could have rebranded themselves Barlow, Owen & Donald."

However, This Life fared better in the Independent where reviewer Helen Brown said: Slogging through the housework to Take That’s ninth album, This Life, I notice a gentle uptick in my mood. Nothing dramatic. No grand romantic swooning over the laundry basket.

"Just a hummable, toe-tappable companionship as the band work through their very English gripes and consolations (rainy days, lost loves, muddled plans) to the jaunty shrug of Gary Barlow’s easy-hook, mustn’t grumble melodies. “No way tomorrow is golden,” they concede on single “This Life”, like a weary co-worker popping a cuppa on your desk, but “a new day can be anything you want”.

David Smyth in the Evening Standard also gave the band three out of five. He wrote: "With the release of this ninth album, Take That’s long journey is evenly split: three as a boy band, three as a reunited man band, and three as the truncated trio of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. That ought to give each era an equal weighting, but their shrunken size as a unit today can’t help but make it feel like greater days are behind them – less the explosive split of their first incarnation, more the slow dissolving of an aspirin."