Tom Odell - Wrong Crowd

The Guardian 40

(Columbia)

The idea of angel-faced piano man Tom Odell hanging with the wrong crowd is, frankly, risible. But the title track of the Ivor Novello award-winner’s second album adds a couple of new dimensions to Odell’s nicey-nicey USP: a regretted past, possibly fictional, and some more muscular moves. Magnetised rues a wrongly polarised relationship with arena ambitions redolent of Odell’s most direct antecedent, Chris Martin. The arresting Concrete, meanwhile, finds Odell busting out a slow jam that approaches R&B, the last thing you would expect. Most of the rest of Wrong Crowd backtracks hard, however, to the sort of house-trained, string-laden guff that gets you John Lewis ads.