Shawn Mendes - Wonder review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 0

(Island Records)
Mendes has a good voice and is occasionally inventive – here’s hoping he has a future beyond soundtracking weddings

‘Why are we wasting time?” wailed Shawn Mendes on Treat You Better, the multiplatinum hit from his last album, Illuminate. It’s a sentiment you find yourself revisiting while watching Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, a deadly feature-length Netflix documentary that accompanies the release of his similarly titled new album. As it unspools, Mendes emerges as a kind of earnest pop singer-songwriter analogue of Ed Sheeran, albeit a very North American one: Sheeran’s beloved Nizlopi and Damien Rice are replaced as chief inspirations by John Mayer – the pop-rock heart-throb John Mayer of Your Body Is a Wonderland, not the latter-day John Mayer who jams 20-minute versions of Dark Star and Drums/Space in a reconstituted version of the Grateful Dead called Dead and Co.

Despite his 150m album sales, Sheeran still looks like your brother’s stoner mate who’s spent the past six months living on someone else’s sofa, whereas Mendes is muscled, matinee-idol handsome and orthodontically perfect, our friends across the Atlantic traditionally preferring their pop stars just so. And he emerges as a thoroughly nice bloke: talented, sensible, kind to the hysterical teens who throw themselves upon him during meet-and-greets. His family back in the suburbs of Ontario seem nice, too. So do his mates from home and his girlfriend, fellow pop star Camila Cabello.

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