Ed Sheeran - ÷

The Guardian 80

Hopping from pant-flinging ballad to Gaelic rap, the former sofa surfer has created a suspiciously slick album that aspires to appeal across the board

In January, Ed Sheeran was interviewed by Chris Evans, who asked whether his pair of stylistically disparate comeback singles – Shape of You and Castle on the Hill, which arrived simultaneously after a three-year hiatus – were written to appeal to the Radio 1 and Radio 2 demographics, respectively. “I wrote both of them for myself,” was Sheeran’s first response, before he reconsidered: “It definitely came into the equation. Everyone said [Castle on the Hill] was a Radio 2 single and we need something for Radio 1. So your theory is correct.”

That Sheeran is a star who considers the best way to make a commercial impact with his music is hardly the revelation of the century (and merely marks him as no more and no less calculating than his peers at the very top level of pop stardom). He is, after all, a consummate professional who would happily thank his accountant, marketing strategist, broadband provider and the concept of gravity if given the stage time at an awards show. However, a flagrant sense of scheming behind every lyric, piece of instrumentation, expression of sentiment and change of mood on Sheeran’s third album hangs over these taut, trim new tracks.

Related: Ed Sheeran: ‘I got hammered and cracked Justin Bieber in the face with a golf club’

Drowned In Sound 30

I think most of us know a Mark, and my Mark is possibly similar to yours. He owns three CDs, all of which stay in his car: an Ed Sheeran album, the newest NOW compilation and a new deluxe edition of Bob Marley Legend. If you asked him he’d say he loves music – ‘Everything really, just no wrist-slitter or heavy metal shit’ – but he’d also admit music isn’t vital to him in the way it is to me. I was best man at Mark’s wedding a few years ago, where he and his wife Ffion chose ‘One’ by Ed Sheeran for their first dance. I’m not offering this story arbitrarily but because whenever people lay into Ed Sheeran - lovely, Superdry-wearing Ed, the copper-haired Bard of Framlingham - as they often do for being boring or vapid, I think of Mark and it makes me like Ed more. Because if Mark - possibly the best person I know; a principled man with little hair who cares deeply about the well-being of his friends and family - can have an Ed Sheeran album track as his wedding song then frankly, he, the Bard, deserves our respect.

The moment this whole theory hits the buffers is when you actually sit down and spend a week consuming Ed’s music; in this case his new album ÷ which since being released has waded into the charts like a steroid-stacked, flat track bully. It’s on course to sell over 500,000 copies in the first week and, at time of writing, each of the album’s 16 tracks is in the top nineteen of the singles chart. Unless Adele rush-releases 27, ÷ is destined to be the biggest-selling album of the year and Ed, so the rumours say, will headline Glastonbury and confirm his status of ‘world’s biggest pop star’ to go with his already-held ‘pop star most you’d most likely bum a rollie off’ title.

So what of the music? The first half of the album has a handful of fairly noteworthy pop tunes. Opener ‘Eraser’ is a personal-diary-cum-rap flecked with natty Spanish-style guitar that, if not quite suggesting Ed’s waking up with a bottle of Grey Goose under his pillow, is at least partial to the extra-curricular foibles that today’s brand of squeaky clean, social-media trained popstars and fopstars view as anathema to their brand image: "You know that I’ve got whisky with white lines and smoke in my lungs / I think life has got to the point I know without it’s no fun".

The two singles released prior to the album’s release - ‘Castle On The Hill’ and ‘Shape Of You’ - are by far the strongest songs, and they’ll be familiar if you’ve listened to a commercial radio station for more than four minutes in 2017. ’Castle On The Hill’ has the kind of ringing guitars that suggest Ed has a grounding in classic, Joshua Tree-era rock, and is full of twee-but-nice reflections on youth and young adulthood that most of us can relate to. ‘Shape Of You’ is a sexy-ish, festival-ready banger with the tropical inflections that served Justin Bieber so well on his last, planet-straddling, album Purpose (whose lead single, ‘Love Yourself’, Ed of course wrote).

Elsewhere ‘Galway Girl’ is a peculiar ditty that fuses elements of Irish trad folk, rock and electro pop which Ed apparently had to battle the label to get on the record. It’s the most eccentric song here, it doesn’t really fit, but if you if you were eight Guinnesses deep in a heaving bar on Galway’s Quay Street, it would would probably be quite fun.

But, really, you’re scratching around the dustbowl for anything else that deviates from the Sheeran template. It’s all just so exceptionally well-polished, and for an artist that often gets tangentially linked with grime, ÷ is really the antithesis of anything that’s ever come out of Bow or Lewisham. It mostly veers from boyband showstoppers to Jack Johnson-esque sunshine balladry, with the latter perhaps not a surprise when you consider that – after finishing his cycle for last album x, a cycle that included a three-night-stand at Wembley Stadium - Ed took a year off to go traveling. A song like the queasily chipper ‘What Do I Know’ is destined to be played on acoustic guitars by men with man buns and tribal tattoos round the fires of Koh Samui for years to come, whilst ‘Barcelona’ again adopts that Flamenco-ish guitar, this time into a painful ode to the Catalan city that also inexplicably makes liberal use of pan pipes.

Songs like ‘Happier’, ‘Perfect’, ‘How Would You Feel (Paen)’ and ‘Dive’ could really be from any purveyor of dew-eyed, acoustic pop from the last 20 years, and invariably remind you of James Blunt, James Bay, James Arthur and many other artists in that vein not only called James.

That’s the biggest surprise here: for someone that is generally perceived as different to other popstars - in terms of his genre-splicing music, knockabout image, and everyman affability which, if you watch the Jumpers for Goalposts film that documents those frankly insane Wembley gigs, seems totally genuine - he has made the most anodyne and bland pop album possible. In a recent Guardian interview he listed the artists he sees as competition - 'Adele, Beyoncé, Taylor, Drake, the Weeknd, Bruno' - and each of them, barring Adele and possibly Bruno Mars, have recently made music that have made a unique, indelible mark on the pop landscape. I’m just not sure that, apart from selling an absolute fuck-ton of records, anything on
÷ will do that.

Still. Mark called me yesterday. He drove from Cardiff to Bolton yesterday and played it the whole way. He thinks it’s a masterpiece. If I was Ed that would be just fine for me.

Pitchfork 28

Ed Sheeran needs you to know that he did not go to university. Instead, he spent his teens slogging around the UK pub circuit, and by the age of 20, he was on his way to becoming Britain’s biggest male pop star. Still, he likes to come back to the uni thing. He sings about not having a degree twice on his new album, ÷, after at least three earlier instances in his catalog. He’s fashioned this weighty chip on his shoulder into an arrow in his quiver, using it to shore up his everyman image and personable nature, while distinguishing himself as a bit of a cheeky system-shunning maverick who’s made it this far on chops alone. His shtick is aspirational: All you need is free will, a little song in your heart, and perhaps you too could one day be playing for 270,000 people across three nights at Wembley Stadium.

Innocence is key to the Ed Sheeran brand. His self-proclaimed uncoolness is what makes him both cool and impervious to bad-tempered criticism. He regularly describes his true love as an angel, refers to his father—a perpetually lingering prophet—as “daddy,” and sings tenderly about his grandparents. On ÷’s release day, he sold copies of his record in an HMV superstore, and looked indistinguishable from the full-time staff. There’s no doubt that Sheeran is calculating, but then he told you as much in his album titles (÷, 2014’s x, and 2011’s +). Like Sia, the Chainsmokers, and Charli XCX, he marvels at his ability to turn out generic hooks like nobody’s business—so many, he doesn’t even remember writing them when they hit No. 1 in 17 countries.

This is the genial, antiseptic frame through which we’re to view Ed Sheeran. But considering he is among the most successful songwriters in the world, a lot of his lyrics do not even scan. “I’m just a boy with a one-man show, no un-er-ver-si-tee..., just a song I wrote,” he sings in “What Do I Know?” like a teenage boy trying to knot a cherry stem with his tongue. When he raps, as he does on “Eraser,” his words fit together with the elegance of Stickle Bricks. Good taste is of no concern: He lets John Mayer sleaze all over the tender ode to his girlfriend “How Would You Feel? (Paean)” with his guitar. Although you can practically hear Rihanna’s laugh after being offered the tropical house concession “Shape of You,” the song generally fares fine until Sheeran, the seventh richest British musician under the age of 30, admits to his dating style: “You and me are thrifty so go all you can eat/Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate/We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour.”

There is no greater evidence of Sheeran’s commercial power than his label acquiescing to keep Corrs tribute “Galway Girl” on this album. Set to bodhrán and uileann pipes, it’s the latest of many Sheeran barnstormers about meeting a great gal (who is definitely real) on a boozy night out. A check from the Irish tourist board for him name-dropping Guinness, Jameson, John Powers, and Van Morrison may be forthcoming, which would certainly cover any forthcoming lawsuit from B*Witched for infringing on their 1998 hit “C’est La Vie.” Sheeran traveled the world for a year before making this record, and considering his cultural takeaway from County Galway, we should be thankful his travels didn’t also inspire him to write a song about lassoing une mademoiselle with a string of onions beneath the Eiffel Tower, or how love sprang eternal with a girl in a dirndl in Austria.

On his past records, Sheeran often painted himself as a drunken mess, at the mercy of bad girls and dark situations. Whatever you made of them, they felt, to use a dirty word, honest. Here, “Eraser” feels like the only true reflection of his psyche, where he acknowledges his unrelatable predicament (“Ain’t nobody wanna see you down in the dumps/Because you’re living your dream, man/This shit should be fun”). For the rest of the record, he switches to a mode of bland wisdom that allows him to ponder the good and bad in people around him rather than look inwards. The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter—nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does. As with Adele, who was also told by Rick Rubin to go back to the drawing board, you suspect that more interesting songs may have been left off the record for commercial reasons.

If there’s a personal touch to Sheeran’s generic sentiments, it’s his unwavering belief in love. He’s often burned for it, he’s desperate for kids, he sees the future in his girlfriend’s eyes. Over the simpering groove of “What Do I Know?” he talks about how his “daddy” told him, “Son, don’t you get involved in politics, religion or other people’s quarrel.” Instead, like a Disney woodland creature, he just wants to pass on “the things my family’s given to me: just love and understanding, positivity.” His feeble message falls apart when the self-confessed careerist sighs at someone surely in his same tax bracket for talking “‘bout exponential growth, and the stock market crashing and their portfolios/While I’ll be sitting here with a song that I wrote.” Sheeran’s conditional optimism flashes back into view, and shows his judgmental ass: “I’m all for people following their dreams/Just remember life is more than fit-tin’ in your jeans,” he sings, in a chummy, winking dig at the basic, vapid women who do not share his own basic, vapid worldview.

It’s one of several striking lyrics about appearances on ÷, which is where the Nice Guy façade comes undone. Sheeran has always loved to neg and to position himself as an innocent victim. If you thought he’d got all that out of his system when he co-wrote Bieber’s risible “Love Yourself,” you were wrong. “Perfect” is “Unchained Melody” by way of Westlife, and a tender assurance to his beloved that she’s not a mess, but a beauty. The barely suppressed creepiness of “Happier” is his attempt at post-breakup maturity, but it doesn’t even last into the next track, “New Man,” a wounded sketch of his ex’s new boyfriend who has “his eyebrows plucked and his arsehole bleached,” and “wears a man bag on his shoulder but I call it a purse.” One nil, Sheeran. He turns his attentions to his ex. What happened to that sweet, sylvan girl who used to read and eat crisps by the river? “Now she’s eatin’ kale/Hittin’ the gym/Keepin’ up with Kylie and Kim.” You mean, when she could be listening to Sheeran rap about his daddy?

This is not to say that anyone should expect Sheeran—who is popular at weddings and funerals for a reason—to present a nuanced interpretation of gender politics within his songs (though his fans deserve more than depictions of women as angels or traitors). But more than his weak balladry, it's this disingenuous side that rankles. In the nostalgic vein of Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” and Drake’s “Weston Road Flows,” Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill” yearns for a childhood idyll. It’s pure sentimentality, another key to how he uses humblebraggadocio and innocence to shore up his moral high ground over shallow girls and unfair beauty standards. On “Eraser,” Sheeran sings, “I’m well aware of certain things that will befall a man like me.” He means booze and drugs, but it’s his inability to reconcile his early underdog status with his titanic popularity that’ll ensnare him. Sheeran wants it both ways: artist and celebrity, nice guy who doesn’t want to alienate his fans with political convictions, anti-consumerist while gagging to dominate pop’s arms race. He’s the guy she told you not to worry about, and he’s wearing your clothes.