“It’s a long way up from rock bottom/There’s been times I felt I could fall further.” So runs the opening line of Ed Sheeran’s eighth studio album. It’s delivered with the quavering falsetto-voice-breaking that’s become default for sung emotion. Like much of the album, it’s a “poor me” lyric. A generation has grown up with popular music ruled by solipsistic whining, with Sheeran leading from the front. Meanwhile the world burns.
Not his fault of course, the trouble we’re all in. He seems a decent man, likeable, good values. But why do so many relate to this drivel? It deflates the soul. Play is lowest common denominator at every level. Sheeran’s usual campfire strum mediocrity is woven, by a range of expert producers, into the blank-eyed club chug of suburban high street pick-up bars, or polished to soul-voided stadium inanity. Dreadful lyrics too. Check the country-tinged “Old Phone” – “I feel an overwhelming sadness of all the friends I do not have left” – I mean, boohoo and everything but, also, what kind of phrasing is that?
The big news is that he made some of the album in Goa, and there’s an Indian subcontinental flavour to some tracks, a dancefloor bubbling. But if you like Indian music, dance music or, well, just music, you’ll be able to locate, in 15 seconds, a not especially interesting song that’s superior. Spend 30 seconds more and you’ll find something good.
Sheeran’s career opened the door to a deluge of cack – Alex Warren, Benson Boone, Lewis Capaldi, Noah Kahan, and the rest. These people have mortally wounded the term “singer-songwriter”. The best singer-songwriters are poets venting what it is to be human, to know love, pain, life, death. Sheeran opens the Coldplay-esque “Camera” with, “You should see the way the stars illuminate your stunning silhouette”. Jesus. Or try “Heaven” which, like “Perfect” before it, will provide teeth-grinding hell for wedding photographers for decades to come (“Just hold me in your arms/Dance with me and sway/As the sun closes on/A beautiful day”).
Obviously this review makes no difference. Sheeran will go on turning out sonic bilge water and people will listen in their millions. The world remains a mysterious place.
Below: Watch the video to Ed Sheeran's nauseatingly schmaltzy single "Camera"
