Photo: Press
Harry Styles yesterday announced his debut solo album, set for release on May 12, with a Tweet of a picture of him topless and washing his face. Presumably he’s trying to wash off the guilt of dragging popular culture down to his derivative, half-baked level.
When the solemn, faintly glam-leaning first single from the album, ‘Sign Of The Times’, was released last week, social media and reviewers heralded it as the arrival of a mature new force in music to rival Oasis, Elton John, Freddie Mercury or David Bowie. Write-ups regularly likened it to ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Hunky Dory’, Father John Misty declared the record “FUCKING INSANE” and one Twitter fan by the name of Santa Claus declared “Bowie and Lorde had a musical baby, asked Prince to be godfather, and named it Harry Styles”. To encourage comparison, he even released it on the 30th anniversary of Prince’s ‘Sign O’ The Times’, which is a bit like someone posting a video of their cat meaowing the tune to ‘God Only Knows’ to mark the anniversary of ‘Pet Sounds’.
This for a song that sounds more like The Stereophonics on spice than any of the above. For all its ‘Imagine’ piano steals, half-written melody and over-produced faux bombast crescendos, it’s a deeply formulaic, relentlessly dull plod of a ‘classic rock’ tune that merely confirms the sad story that pop music – in the form of Bastille, The 1975, Blossoms and now Styles – has assimilated, suffocated and sucked the essence out of rock without ever really understanding it.
The relief over Styles emerging from his teen-pop roots as a grown-up, rounded stadium rock ‘artiste’, rather than yet another synthy soul singer, goes to show just how low the bar is set in 2017. In the comparisons made, there’s no consideration given to the chameleonic anti-establishment daring of 70s Bowie, Lennon’s pop-destroying experimentation or Freddie’s stadium-carrying charisma. To liken Styles’ ultra-mundane effort to such figureheads is like Tiffany's deciding to stock Rolex watches they’ve bought wholesale off a bloke in a pub. That this bog-standard lighter-waver that even The Darkness would have set aside ‘needing more work’ is being hailed in some quarters as one of the year’s greatest songs only cheapens and degrades the art, and we can expect a whole album’s worth to come – Styles has released the tracklisting below too. We can only hope, for the sake of rock, that ‘Carolina’ is a “FUCKING INSANE” reworking of an old Shaggy tune…
Harry Styles’ album tracklisting is:
Meet Me in the Hallway
Sign of the Times
Carolina
Two Ghosts
Sweet Creature
Only Angel
Kiwi
Ever Since New York
Woman
From the Dining Table
