30th January: James Blunt - The Afterlove (pop, 2017)
James Blunt, more commonly known today for being funny twitter man, was once a fairly important
part of my musical development. These days only a handful of his songs I can stomach, and all of
them have flaws, but he could write a great melody and had some pretty beautiful chord
progressions. You’d think, with all the money in the world, an undeniably solid basic
understanding of songwriting and his well-known sense of humour, that he could pull of some fairly
good late-career self-satire? Sadly not.
This is the first truly bad album I’ve heard from Blunt, and oh boy is it bad. He’s not even being
bad with his tongue in cheek here, as there’s very little to differentiate most of this from Ed
Sheeran, and if I’m honest the pathetic trendhopping in the sounds here makes it even worse. I
don’t think Blunt needs to prove anything to anyone, so I’m honestly not even sure why he’d bother
making an album like this. Maybe it’s all just to fuel those so epic jokes he posts.
2.7 (1st listen)
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