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Musician Ed Sheeran
Photo: Dan Martensen / Warner Music
Album of the week:
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Album art of "="
Whether US superstar The Weeknd has actually contacted Ed Sheeran to complain that the no less popular British colleague has stolen his style and visuals for the video for the mega hit "Bad Habits" to get a bit of
bad ass
to act? Probably not. Even if Sheeran in a pink jacket and lots of eye make-up can be made into a "Joker" cut, the vampire monster is not taken from him. Dangerousness is not his game, and you can't blame him for a long time anyway. The man, 30 years old, more than 150 million records sold, is the personified toughness. Probably everyone has already caught himself humming along to one of his ubiquitous songs. You don't have to worry about that: Ed Sheeran is just a damn good songwriter. At least when it comes to pop catchy tunes.
Sheeran is friends with filmmaker and screenwriter Richard Curtis, who both have properties in the same neighborhood in Suffolk. Curtis is known for his very British, cheesy-comic rom-coms, which have also become long-time TV hits with us, especially at Christmas, which is soon looming again: "Four weddings and a death", "Notting Hill", "Indeed ... love"; Curtis wrote them all. Almost inevitably, neighbor Sheeran played in Curtis' last film, the cute Beatles comedy "Yesterday" - as himself Heart had to close. At least that's what happened to me.
His fourth album »=« (read: »equals«) now works like a Curtis script, with which he concludes his math quatrology, which he began ten years ago with »+«: At the beginning, one defends oneself against the obvious emotional manipulation , but then one sinks emotionally into the sofa and surrenders. You smile at slapstick and embarrassing things, you sniff and cry when it gets maudlin: "Love Actually", the audio book.
At first, however, you think the only surprise of the album is that you landed on Bryan Adams' new record (which is called, by the way, not incongruously, "So Happy It Hurts", but will not be released until March), the guitar riff is booming so unusually loud of »Tides«, so Adams-like is the song and stanza structure. At the latest in the chorus, when Sheeran falls into falsetto, the effect is perdu. The text is about how the tides of his life changed with the birth of his daughter in the past year - a classic pop theme for 30-year-olds, brought to the point by the great simplifier Sheeran so routinely that he is no longer even whole You have to form sentences for this: "Life is changing ... tides". Well
Then come the pop hits that are in tune with the musical chart trend: »Shivers« is actually an involuntary Corona time hymn: »When you're close up / Give me the shivers, baby / You burn so hot« - you're coming too close to me? With fever? Are you crazy!? Very funny ... or not when you consider that poor Ed is currently in quarantine with Covid infection. But in no way as sexy as it is meant to be. Bad Habits, see above, explains that the domesticated bard's only bad habit seems to be spending his evenings and nights in the studio or on the phone too often instead of with his wife and child. Wow, pretty
reckless
.
Wife Cherry Seaborn and daughter Lyra Antarctica are then also the defining theme in the following ten songs.
Play Wembley in front of 80,000 people?
Not as cool as the first kiss with you, he sings to his wife in "First Times", but after that it gets a bit soapy with "The Joker and The Queen" or "Leave Your Life";
He could also sing popular galloping things like "Collide" in a duet with Helene Fischer, musically it would fit, in terms of content anyway.
UK garage veteran Craig David can probably only smile wearily at the vocal skill flexing "2Step" interspersed in the ballads: Hello, the noughties here, we want our genre back.
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Ed Sheeran
=
Label: Warner Music International
Label: Warner Music International
approx € 13.23
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But it doesn't matter.
While you are still wondering whether Sheeran could have put a little more effort into his new songs, towards the end there is even the Sandman (the sand person?) With ukulele, marshmallows and mobile over the bed - and the album becomes Ultimately, the homely harmless FSK 6 entertainment: Teddy Sheeran, now for the whole family.
Who wants to spoil the contemplative mood as a bad-tempered critic?
Pssst!
Boy, the little one just fell asleep!
“Be Right Now”, the final piece, then somehow slipped over from the new Coldplay album.
But it fits perfectly as an emo
banger
for the credits of this cozy blockbuster.
The only thing missing is Hugh Grant.
But please with dyed red hair.
(4.0)
Listened briefly:
Tori Amos - "Ocean To Ocean"
"It has been a brutal year," sings Tori Amos on her new album - and it speaks to us all from the soul.
In the third lockdown (British account), isolated with her husband and daughter in Cornwall, the US songwriter crawled towards demons from all corners of her soul, like the creepers and crawlers that terrorized at night in her new, funny song »Spies«.
To speak of one of her best albums is difficult with Amos, who has never released anything really bad or bad in almost 30 years, but it is certainly her most intimate in a long time. It's about saying goodbye to the deceased mother (“Speaking With Trees”), longing and loneliness (“Swim To New York State”), fear, with sometimes all too dignified adult pop production and the usual stunning piano ballads nature ("Ocean To Ocean") and once again about her rape trauma ("29 Years"), which was once thematized in "Me And A Gun" - in this respect, her 16th studio album ties in with her debut "Little Earthquakes" from 1992, but of course with more maturity and self-healing power (»Metal Water Wood«). Maybe you have the mythical
Cornish piskies
helped with her magical powers - and the cleansing power of the ocean when you stand on the cliffs.
(8.2)
Kuoko - »Kuoko«
The self-made electronic musician Jasmine Quach alias Kuoko from Hamburg also listens to the whispering of the ocean on her very nice debut. But don't be fooled by the harmonious gentleness of the opening track “Ocean Whisper” and the intimacy of this bedroom pop album: in “Yellow Fever Gaze” she castigates racism and the stereotypes with which the singer and all-round artist with roots is confronted every day in Vietnam, "Perfect Girl" is a feminist dance and battle track against patriarchal rules of beauty and behavior. Kuoko's beautiful old-fashioned click-clack beats, to which she arranges modular and synthesizer sounds, are economical but effective. They open spaces for their dreamy-looking, but clear and wide-awake singing, which reveals a touching vulnerability.Soon no longer an insider tip. (7.5)
The War On Drugs - "I Don't Live Here Anymore"
Guess what Adam Granduciel, singer and songwriter for US rock band The War On Drugs, called his now two-year-old son: Bruce. According to Springsteen. You can do it when you are always nostalgic and love the sound of synth-heavy, indulgent albums like "Tunnel of Love" or "Human Touch", not exactly the strongest phase in the career of the "Boss". A bit of Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Daniel Lanois from the eighties now resonates on the fifth album of the stadium-filling blockbuster adult band, if not the atrocities of Mike & The Mechanics or Phil Collins ("Victim"). One would therefore like to exclaim "Oh Mercy", it sounds so polished, domesticated and saturated, to Bruce Hornsby piano or guitar music in blunt four-four time. Rock'n'Roll no longer lives here. (3.0)
Tristan Brusch - »On the rest«
He's got a tit, no, nonsense, pigeon! An air rat that gets hold of a huge piece of kebab meat. Finds Tristan Brusch, extreme chansonnier and Schlager anarcho from Kreuzberg by way of Gelsenkirchen, cute - and stands for the video in a wedding dress with a guitar on a ladder in the pampas to sing about the "scraps" with whom he feels more comfortable than all the mainstream hypocrites. »Am Rest« pokes around in the very last abysses of life, at the edges of which he just clings to, as in the beautiful title song - or lets himself fall into it as in »2006«, which is about the death of his ex-girlfriend. Uff. There is also well-plucked live guitar and element-of-crime contemplation, which can turn into ugly noise at any time. "Come in, come in, come in, always put everything in the cunt",Brusch roars his self, world and consumer disgust into the world in "Two Miracles a Day". Listening at your own soul's risk. (7.0)