Ed Sheeran, Play Review: Netflix for Your Ears

ED SHEERAN

PLAY (WARNER)

Today I listened to the entirety of Ed Sheeran’s new album, Play, because despite loathing him with the heat of a thousand suns, I thought that I should at least give him a chance to prove me wrong.

That was my first mistake.

Ed Sheeran Play Review

I’m not sure it even qualifies as an album. I mean technically, yes, it is a sequence of musical tracks arranged in a specific order. However, it is also a weightless, soulless progression of musical content, designed to fill a certain number of minutes of commercial radio. It is Netflix for your ears. It will fill time until the next thing comes along.

I suppose I’m more angry at the people who absorb this kind of shite through their skin rather than the guy who makes it. Find out what people want and give them a lot of it, right? That’s a rock solid business plan.

Let it settle around you like meringue, let him sum up your entire life in bad poetry and play it at your wedding reception. This is the music of real estate agents in love, played out during their first dance in front of the entire staff of Carina Harcourts.

It is offensively inoffensive, so white it hurts to look at, such a panacea to smug, comfortable, mainstream acceptance. And it fills stadiums. Over and over and over again.

Fuck you Ed. We have not evolved over countless millennia, survived plague, famine and disaster, fought and died, lived and loved and endured just so you can inflict your product on humanity at a time when things are already pretty bad.

It starts out in a deceptively acceptable fashion with the accurately named Opening. A plaintive folky tune, nicely sung. Ed’s been through some things, apparently, and wants us to know about it. But then at the one minute and twenty mark someone leans across the mixing desk and shoves the slider marked “God no, not this again” all the way to the top and Ed starts rapping.

Why, Ed? Why? Why would anyone want this? We live in a world that is plump with gifted, incandescently brilliant rappers and Ed, you cheeky monkey, are not one of them. Stop it at once.

Moving on, we face plant straight into Sapphire. It’s unclear if this is about the titular gemstone or someone that Ed feels possesses the same qualities as a hardened mineral deposit. Any lingering mysteries are quickly overwhelmed by the realisation that Ed has now gone Bollywood. I mean, why the fuck not? It’s Ed’s world and we are just living in it. No doubt this has all been ethically sourced and culturally consulted upon but the question still remains: why? What is the point?

The point is there is no point. It just is, let it happen and maybe the next track will be better.

It isn’t. Azizam is, I suppose, a banger. Ed wants us to get up, get up, get up. I don’t want to get up, thanks. I want it to be over. Ed also chillingly informs the subject of the song that he wants be “close to their face”. Leaning over their bed in the middle of the night? Grinning like a murder clown with a torch held under his chin? Shudder…

Oh look - Ed’s found his old phone in the next song, Old Phone. Can you guess what happens when he charges it up and starts looking through messages from old friends and exes? Do you think he might get a bit fucking wistful? I’ll never tell, but maybe, Ed, if you hadn’t taken your guitar along to so many parties you might have a few more friends today. Just saying.

And on and on it goes. More Bollywood inflected butt shakers, more whining, more pointless filler. Is it filler if the whole album is filled with filler? Or is it just a constant stream of ones and zeroes to mark time between Monday and Friday?

Music is not supposed to be this. Music is supposed to make you feel something, to lift you up, shake out your anger, throw you up against a wall, wring you out, get you laid, anything.

But no. This is music to remind you that you are conscious, breathing and that you look the same as everyone else in the stadium. It asks nothing of you and gives nothing in return.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve missed the whole point of Ed Sheeran. And look, if you do like him I apologise for saying that earlier that I’m angry at you. I don’t know, I hadn’t slept well and was hungry. You do you. We can still be friends.

In the meantime, have a quick listen to Lola Young’s SPIDERS off her upcoming album I’m Only F***ing Myself. It might be the antithesis of everything Ed has done, and bless her for that. We’re not completely doomed. Not quite yet…