Ed Sheeran has a point to prove. Just four months after he released Subtract comes his seventh album, which he wrote after he noticed the life changes his friends were going through this time last year. Sheeran went through his own ordeal this summer, when the long-running plagiarism case brought by Marvin Gaye’s estate was finally settled in his favour. The victory, he noted, was not just for him: it helped to “protect the creative process of songwriters” without fear of recrimination.
There is no sign of that newfound sense of artistic latitude on Autumn Variations, which, notably, is the first of Sheeran’s album that he owns the copyright to. Instead, this is an album bogged down by cliched lyrics and unimaginative melodies. Cowritten and produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, and supposedly inspired by Elgar’s Enigma Variations, these are largely folky, stripped-back affairs at odds with Subtract’s emotional sincerity. It is not so much a companion piece to Subtract – an album laden with forgivably gloopy candour, and also produced by Dessner – as an ugly stepsister.
These are largely stripped-back tracks desperately in need of fuller production; truthfully, these songs simply require more work. Many speak to Sheeran’s downbeat state of mind; he wrestles a full four-minute song lamenting the fact that his friends don’t want to go out and celebrate his birthday on The Day I Was Born. Plastic Bag is about the way a directionless life can lead to “finding solace in a shot glass on Saturday night”; truly, a revelation!
The folky England, written with Dessner’s bandmate Matt Berninger, attempts to paint a wistfully reminisced portrait of his homeland but lands somewhere between naff and unrelentingly grim. Amid Sheeran’s rhyming-dictionary lyrics on the dull Punchline and Blue, a song that sounds as if it began life strummed at a house party populated solely by Bon Iver fans, are tracks such as Midnight and That’s On Me, the former an identikit pop song pieced together with offcuts from his back catalogue, the latter a feeble attempt at his rap-singing trademark that lands with a thud. It would almost make you misty-eyed for the days of Galway Girl. Almost.
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The album’s single saving grace, despite its wince-inducing lyrics about the early days of his relationship with his wife, is American Town, one of several here that nod to Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre.
Sheeran wants to prove a point, but in his rush to do so it seems that he’s forgotten the craft and imagination required to write an enduring album. Sheeran is capable of better than this, as he proved just four months ago.
