I still can’t decide whether “Play“eighth album by Ed Sheeran, whether his most courageous work or just a good contemporary pop disc.
This uncertainty, which continues to remain even after numerous plays, is perhaps the very key of the disc: a work that escapes a univocal definition, suspended between reassurance and calculated risk.
Sheeran intertwines Indian suggestions, Persians Ee Punjabi with the pop-Folk matrix that made him a global phenomenon. On paper a fascinating cultural bridge, in practice a device that does not always convince: sometimes it remains a simple sound embellishment, other times it generates moments of surprising intensity. Thus passes from the ordinary Old Phone to the most successful Room And The Vowruthless ballads in their emotional precision, up to the Lo-Fi piano In Other Wordsready to enter the marriage playlists, with all the load of sweetness and predictability it entails.
On the disc there is also color as in the case of A Little Moresinuous, soft almost urban with a final rap and the eastern arias of Don’t look down.
The real novelty of Play However, it lies in its emotional temperature. For an artist who has always oscillated between melancholy and falling in love, more gloomy cracks emerge: professional paranoia, worn friendships, an almost obsessive sense of having to defend his position. Slowlywho should simply tell the lack of his wife, ends up evoking disturbing scenarios: “kill me slowly”, “I’m dying alive”. It is an unpublished, which leaves us interdict and almost restless.
Yet the commercial power remains intact: the singles run fast, grind streaming and continue to taste for an audience that seems not to know tiredness. The Sheeran machine is properly oiled, indifferent to the doubts of the criticism.
The point, however, is precisely this: what is under the surface? Play It is a good disc, solid and well packaged, but it is not something decisive. It has the merit, however, to c over the facade, showing an artist who tries to go further without having still found a new balance. Or maybe I’m wrong, and once again he will be right, who seems to know better than anyone else what people like.
Score: 7.00
Opening – 7.50 vote
Sapphire – 7.00 vote
Azizam – 7.00 vote
Old Phone – 7.00 vote
Symmetry – Vote 7, O0
Chamber – Vote 7.00
In Other Words 7.00 vote
A Little More Vote 7.50
Slowly – Vote 6.50
Don’t Look Down – Vote 6.50
The Vow vote 7.00
For Always vote 7.00
Heaven vote 6.50
The votes of others
The Guardian – Vote 6.00
NME – vote 6.00
Rolling Stone (USA) – Vote 6.00
The independence – Vote 6.00
The disc works in its entirety of introspection and fun. But I prefer and in a joyful version
