Is that a tear in my eye or is my face scrunching up like an accordion because I’m sick of listening to songs so familiar and generic that I’m edging dangerously closer to copying the Spotify link for Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and pasting it into my head because anything is surely better than the current crop of seemingly algorithm-based pop music? That’s the kind of reaction provoked by the relentless uniformity of Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent.
The follow-up to Lewis Capaldi’s 10-million-plus-selling debut, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, from 2019, seamlessly continues a preference for emotive power ballads and soul-scraping lyrics. If the debut was bursting with what has been described as “full-force, ugly crying pop”, this is a power hose of weeping and groaning.
If you have ever wondered how one person can experience so much emotional hurt and write such hackneyed words about it, just listen to these songs and all will be revealed. Of course, one person’s generic is another person’s specific, and while there’s little doubt that many of the songs here will connect with people, what rankles is Capaldi’s by-the-numbers approach.
With the safety valve glued to the on position, the album trades in cliche. The prime example is Pointless: “I bring her coffee in the morning, she brings me inner peace/ I take her out to fancy restaurants, she takes the sadness out of me/ I make her cards on her birthday, she makes me a better man / I take her water when she’s thirsty, she takes me as I am.”
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The song, written with Steve Mac, Johnny McDaid and Ed Sheeran, broadly positions Capaldi as a familiar stereotype: a hopeless mope of a guy with what you can only imagine is a long-suffering partner.
Such narratives run through the album, especially on the likes of The Pretender, Burning, How This Ends, and How I’m Feeling Now. The plus points? The songs are driven by melody and arranged for variations of piano and acoustic guitar, the production is pleasantly sparse yet comforting and the vocals are as grounded as you could hope for.
There are no killer tunes, however, merely pretty reworkings of the excessively familiar. Perhaps the biggest yawn is the overbearing weight of a music-industry formula: if you like this, then you will like this. Gut reaction? It’s not you, it’s meh.
