I guess I should give this a listen and see what the hype is about and if it is just that hype with little substance from the product. Not the first pop artist I have reviewed around here in fact at the end of the year I always have a top 10 pop album list, so it is a genre I sometimes enjoy if it is done right. The done-right part might be the challenge here. But I am not one to say I do not like something without listening to the album. So here we go. The facts going into this are this album which is clearly rolling off the assembly line of the industry's agenda machine boasts 14 songwriters and 12 producers for the 23 songs featured on the album. The opening track benefits from great production in how the harmony vocals are layered. Aside from that, the overall vibe is his vocals could be that of any random singer on a gay house track. Having worked in plenty of gay bars over the years, I have heard more than enough of this already, it's just being re-packaged for today.
"No God" has the most substance in terms of the lyrics having something to say. This is also the best vocal performance of the first half of the album. He clearly only listens to black female singers as he emulates Toni Braxton most of the time. "Lose You' is once again gay house being sold to a mainstream audience. So three songs in and I am not hating this album, but "Perfect" sounds like the most generic color by numbers stab at radio pop, like they used a program to find the algorithms of what gets radio play and followed the blue print. 'Unholy" uses the Hungarian minor scale, which is one of my favorite as it's darker. Satanic not so much, but we are in the middle of Black Metal History Month. This song might be the stand out as it does not conform to western pop standards, but it also just ends and does not go any where dynamically. It just ends when it needs a third section. In rock music this would be where the guitar solo went.
"How to Cry" is stripped down to the strum of an acoustic guitar. His vocals are more dynamic here, but the song itself feels empty. I think he needs Robert Smith to teach him how to cry as his best attempts at emoting do not convince me , he was not just punching the clock at the studio. "Six Shots' found his producer going into his generic pop/r&b folder and using the tracks that had just been sitting there. "Gimme" has more to it as a song, and works pretty well with it's steamy salsa undertones. Then we are back to the disco roots of gay house as interpreted by pop in 2023, which we have already heard Justin Timberlake and Adam Levine both do before. I do have more respect for this than the generic pop tracks.
The title track is a stripped down choir vocal that Smith is not a part of but ad libs over . If he had pulled a Queen and multi tracked the vocals himself I might be more impressed. Sheeran who duet's with who ever has a label to flip the bill shows up on the last song, which he even he adds a little to, but I am sure the marketing here will try to spin this as the gay anthem of the year when Pride month comes around and half of the people reading this will fall for it. I will round this down to a 6.5, as all the soul it should have gets produced out of it by cut-and-paste production. So it's a slick product that will fool stupid masses with the depth of paper plates, but musical not terrible just bland with a few decent moments, he needs to just lean into the gay house side, as mainstream success will really just be the 15 minutes of fame his current controversy grants him then the news cycle will spin away and people will forget about him.
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