Review Summary: Tryna find something real, but that's not the game they play.
I knew the moment I saw the music video for "Bad Habits", featuring Ed Sheeran prancing around a grungey city with blown-out hair, overwhelming mascara, and dressed in a pink, attention-grabbing suit like a Joker clone, that this album-shaped object obnoxiously called "=" would be kinda bad. Ed Sheeran, as a musician, hasn't had a distinctive personality for a long time now -
+ and
X (seriously, why does he think these are clever? Did no one close to Sheeran disagree with his stance on these garbage album titles?) weren't anything to write home about, but at least there was a
sliver of personality present on those records, albums that featured an innocent, earnest white boy that brought mediocre rapping and a touch of Yorkshire civility to the folk-pop table. It wasn't anything
good, but it was identifiable. But once
÷ and the gag-inducing "Shape of You" dropped, Sheeran took the popstar road
frequently traveled and just kinda gave up. Why bother putting in the effort to make a sound for yourself when you could just make money instead?
And that's where he's been in the last five-odd years, just doing whatever and coasting through life, releasing paychecks cleverly disguised as songs in the meantime. When you're the UK's most streamed artist on Spotify, you can afford to stop giving a f*ck. Not one, but
two, boring-ass duets with Justin Bieber? Sure, why not. A horrible feature on some lame, late-game Eminem song? Aight, fine, might as well. And a brand-new music video where Ed Sheeran pretends to be a vampire and The Joker all in one? What the hell, why not, sounds fun. This is exactly the kind of thing you do when you have no personality - you dip your toes into different pools without ever really lingering in the water for too long, really just to see what happens, just to have something to Tweet about. But Sheeran's so
boring that the pools are probably full of tap water or something instead of actual chlorine or saltwater. Why bother with personality when
profit is so much more important?
Whatever primer they sprayed over
= to ensure it was completely devoid of personality did a damn good job, because this is a
barren album. The foot-stomping, four-on-the-floor, folky rock that is "Tides" is three minutes of nothingness, the very definition of inoffensive. The only thing worth noting about it is the Bon Iver-y acapella chorus break, a break that, while admittedly very pretty, lush, and stripped-down, feels jarring and out-of-place when rubbing shoulders with the louder verses. "Shivers" is a bland dance track with a tiny drum machine, faint acoustic guitar, and quaint little pizzicato strings. It's too limp and restrained to be truly danceable, but the chorus is too bombastic for the song to qualify as "chill". And, of course, "Bad Habits" sucks. It's total banality, featuring a summertime synth beat you'd find on Apple Loops or a "royalty-free dance tracks" collection. It's got none of the vague, folksy charm of Sheeran's better output, and thus it feels more like a commercial than a song. After all - why bother with songs when you can get those sweet, sweet $$$ stacks instead?
The entire record has this frustrating dullness about it that's impossible to shake - you will, guaranteed, glaze over with boredom at least one point or another. I got pretty sick of the insistent, four-on-the-floor bass drum of "Be Right Now" pretty quickly, and that was before the "Blue Monday"-esque stuttering synths and vintage synth strings took me out of it entirely. "Visiting Hours" is milquetoast when it's supposed to be moving and hackneyed when it's supposed to be heavenly, Ed Sheeran starts rapping again on "2Step" and it's exactly as obnoxious as one would expect it to be, and the trite, cheery, sterile acoustics and xylophones of "Sandman" are the f*cking worst. This is cooking video music. This is something you could hop onto Pond5 and buy a million soundalikes of right now, and it'd probably sound better than this hokey piece of sh*te. "He wrote it for his daughter"-- shut up, who cares? Why bother caring at all when you could just zone out to the sound of swiss cheese and corn?
I think the source of my irrational frustration towards this otherwise boilerplate, dodgy record - beyond the fact that it's easy to make fun of the miserable thing - is the fact that there's some actual diamonds in the rough here. The middle of the album is almost
good, in fact. "Collide" is a successful combination of rapid-fire acoustic percussion and moody, rueful synth pads, "Stop the Rain" is dominated by stadium-sized "Rolling In The Deep"-esque theatrics in the verse and a gossamer 2010's club-funk beat in the chorus, and "Leave Your Life" is one of the more interesting tracks on the record: there's a subterranean, reversed-instrument sound in the verses - a la Justin Timberlake's "Blue Ocean Floor" - that glides into the warm, resonant, shimmering chorus perfectly. And lest I forget "The Joker and the Queen", it's easy to see why this was the secret standout track on the record. It's a shockingly subtle, stripped-down song, leaning on pensive, fragile piano chords, bossa-nova acoustics, elegant string sections, and Sheeran's light, angelic tenor. It's telling that in an album full of generic, derivative modern-pop nonsense, the calm, reductive ballad is the highlight of the entire experience. It's special in a way that all of the overproduced banality on this record could never be, simply by virtue of there being just too
much of it.
And therein lies the problem. There's just
too much of nothing present on this record - sounding pretty can only go so far, and it's simply not enough.
= is, with very few exceptions, a snoozefest with songs veering from the unremarkable to the groan-inducingly trite, topped off with some of the most uninteresting and overblown production choices in Sheeran's entire discography. It's junk fast food but without any of the calories, protein molecules, or carbohydrates that makes junk food actually taste like something. And the worst part is that, instead of being utterly skippable,
= has the audacity to tease you with some actual quality once in a while before just-as-quickly fading back into mediocrity and mindlessness, as if Sheeran couldn't even be bothered to try. Why bother trying when you could just throw in the towel?
