Lewis Capaldi - Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent

The Guardian 60

(Virgin EMI)
Singing dolorous ballads in a style that makes Adele look stoic takes some doing, but Capaldi’s honesty is appealing

Few artists have quite such a disparity between their music and their public persona as 22-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi. On social media, he’s as strenuously bluff and self-deprecating as this debut album title, expressing bafflement at his newfound fame (his single Someone You Loved spent seven weeks at No 1) and larking about on his Instagram stories. In song, however, he’s a man utterly battered by a breakup, singing every dolorous ballad as if wrapped in a duvet on the sofa.

It starts brightly enough: Grace is a superb single, driven by a Mumford-style hoedown thump and a convincing gospel energy to Capaldi’s ascending, imploring chorus notes. The way he drives his voice up further still at the euphoric climax, exalting his wavering lover through the very melody, is really heartstopping. But this pitch in the last-chance-saloon clearly doesn’t work, and the rest of the record is bracketed firmly in the tiramisu-for-dinner phase of being dumped.

Related: The ordinary boys: how Ed Sheeran-inspired troubadours swept the charts