Ed Sheeran No 6 Collaborations Project Out now
Ed Sheeran isn’t really a pop star at all: he’s a businessman with a seven-year plan. In 2012, when his debut album, +, reached No 1, he told an interviewer he would release two more albums named after arithmetical symbols, followed by a set of duets.
And so it came to pass. Following x and ÷, those duets are upon us.
All that arithmetic offers a clue to Sheeran’s motivation. His motto seems to be: I sing, therefore I sell. Last weekend this album outsold the rest of the Top 40 combined.
Two of Ed Sheeran’s guests stand out from the rest: Stormzy (pictured with Sheeran at the Brit Awards in 2017), whose energy lights up Take Me Back To London, and Khalid
He was still in the Top 10 with ÷ after 123 weeks, still in the top 50 with x after 264 weeks, still in the top 100 with + after 377 weeks. To borrow a line from Leonard Cohen, he’s as stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay.
At least the new album is a bit different. The title even contains some words, albeit not very poetic ones. And Sheeran’s soggy vocals are reinforced by a regiment of guests.
The problem is that it’s not so much a project as a parade, like one of those awards shows where the real point is to have celebrities trotting out to announce the winners.
The guest list mixes A-list Americans (Justin Bieber, Camila Cabello) with rising stars of British hip-hop. The music is mostly formulaic, modern R&B, with stabs at Latino pop, Jamaican dancehall and London grime.
To adapt Alex James’s dig at Damon Albarn, Sheeran wants to be the blackest man in rural Suffolk.
Albarn has long since shaken off the jibe with his eclectic excellence. Sheeran hinted at something similar on x, as he moved on from busker’s pop towards classic soul. Some of these songs come close to that silky lightness, but they’re trying too hard to resemble other people’s hits – or his own.
Twice, he aims to emulate his biggest seller, Shape Of You: if he’s not careful he may receive a lawsuit from himself. The lyrics, too, are familiar – often clunky, always everyman-ish.
Sheeran is candid about his millennial anxieties, ranging from social awkwardness to thinning hair. But the candour can tip over into conceit: he even sings ‘grossed half a billi’ on the + tour’. Gross is the word.
After 14 tracks I was thinking ‘Well, at least there’s no Galway Girl’. But then along came another kind of atrocity. It’s a song called BLOW, featuring Bruno Mars and the country-rocker Chris Stapleton.
Something possessed the three of them to pay homage to Led Zeppelin. It goes as well as you might expect.
Two of Sheeran’s guests stand out from the rest: Stormzy, whose energy lights up Take Me Back To London, and Khalid, whose subtlety adds flavour to the arm-swaying anthem Beautiful People.
Remember The Name is likeable too – a pop-rap song with a sweet jaunty strut which, if it didn’t have Eminem and 50 Cent on it, could come from a musical.
Those three songs are worth seeking out. The album, alas, is not. It’s so calculated, it might as well be called %.
k.d. lang
Brighton Dome Touring until Sunday
She was born and bred on the Canadian prairies, but when k.d. lang plays Brighton, it’s as if she has come home. Her audience appears to consist of 1,600 gay women and half a dozen men.
The mere sight of her, barefoot and besuited, sends them into a rapture that never relents.
She’s here to revisit Ingénue, the album that made her name in 1992. At the time it seemed like an elegant set of timeless songs about unrequited love. Today it stands as a monument on the road to equal rights – hence the reception.
Now 57 and nonchalantly witty, k.d. lang is an ingénue no longer, but she plays the album in full. Her voice is commanding, her seven-piece band alternately faithful and inventive
Now 57 and nonchalantly witty, lang is an ingénue no longer, but she plays the album in full. Her voice is commanding, her seven-piece band alternately faithful and inventive, adding splashes of jazz to these supperclub tunes.
Miss Chatelaine and Constant Craving still glow, while Wash Me Clean is a revelation, deliciously slow and starkly beautiful.
Afterwards there’s time for only seven more songs, but lang paints a triptych for the great Canadian songwriters. She’s laconic on Joni Mitchell’s Help Me, majestic on Neil Young’s Helpless, and pyrotechnic on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
First stripped back, then searingly soulful, it’s like a track from a great lost album: Aretha Franklin Sings Leonard Cohen.
kdlang.com
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASE
By Adam Woods
Lloyd Cole Guesswork Out Fri
Eighties star Lloyd Cole has got new tricks, namely a stylish electronic sound inspired by Kraftwerk, Eno and co. His swooshing and plinking synths suit his rumpled yet hopeful songs. See if the superficially Radio Ga Ga-ish single Violins works for you
Shakespears Sister Singles Party (1988-2019) Out now
Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit’s singles have aged well, combining smart Nineties pop with Bowie glam and Prince-style funk. This has Fahey’s lone efforts, plus remixes and two new songs recorded after a 25-year estrangement
Purple Mountains Purple Mountains Out now
A master lyricist and an endearingly wry frontman with Silver Jews, David Berman’s return is a welcome one, and this is an unsparing reckoning with a life of bad choices, balancing almost comically self-lacerating honesty with lush, upbeat tunes
Flaming Lips King’s Mouth Out now
For a few years around 2000, US psychedelic pranksters Flaming Lips were roughly the world’s best pop group, but then they went off-piste. This sees them nodding towards accessibility again with a batch of pretty, lulling space-ballads