George Ezra - Staying at Tamara’s

The Guardian 60

(Columbia)

Even by the standards of critically uncool music, George Ezra is not cool. Time was when all any summer jam needed was a guitar-playing hat man faintly acquainted with ska. That simple time is over, the sound of the summer is now self-loathing set to slinky dancehall. Paolo Nutini is in the wilderness. Even Olly Murs sings sex jams now. It makes Ezra’s second album a total anachronism, and potentially more charming for it: horns parp, hands clap, choruses rouse and seethe with bonhomie.

The Guardian 40

(Columbia)

How do you follow a debut that was the UK’s third-biggest-selling album of 2014? In the case of Hertford’s George Ezra, fresh of face and grizzled of voice, you head to Barcelona with a guitar for a month, eschewing glitzy hotels for an Airbnb owned by the Tamara of the title, and write 11 more songs that don’t mess with the winning singer-songwriter formula of Wanted on Voyage. In interviews, Ezra has said these songs are about “escaping and dreaming”. And while the real world briefly intrudes on opener Pretty Shining People, as he describes a friend telling him, “what a terrible time to be alive if you’re prone to overthinking”, any suggestion of further introspection is swiftly kicked into touch by a chorus so preposterously cheerful it makes REM’s similarly titled Shiny Happy People sound like an anguished howl at the dying of the light.

Elsewhere, his undeniably impressive baritone is put to good use on Saviour; Paradise possesses an irresistible momentum; and the Club Tropicana-esque escapism of Shotgun is hard to dislike. But Staying at Tamara’s defining mood is one of unchallenging, and unflinching, politeness. It will doubtless be huge.