I am an album person. I don’t consider myself to be a fan of a band unless they they have at least one LP that I know start to finish. When I hear a song I like, my most cherished dream is that I will listen to the full album and find it to be 45 minutes of similarly great songs. (I’m disappointed a lot.) I don’t have to love every song on an album to love the album. There are plenty of albums that have tracks that leave me cold, but I still listen to them because they’re an integral part of the whole. An album is not about individual songs, but about how they fit together and their overall effect.
I’ve listened to a lot of great songs released in 2017. In nearly every case I’ve pulled up their parent albums on Spotify, hoping to hit the jackpot, and wound up disappointed instead. Usually the biggest problem is not that the other songs on the album are bad — it’s that the album is just a string of slightly less good versions of the hit. There’s no sense of movement or wholeness.
The new HAIM album illustrates this phenomenon. The first three tracks are fantastic, but as it goes on, I’m either zoning out or working too hard to differentiate each song. (This is the one about a break up that’s a little bit dream pop, this is the one about a break up that’s about not trusting the guy.) HAIM are fully capable of writing a great song, and if I hear any one of their songs on its own, I usually like it. But their LP has that “same-y” quality that plagues many a just-OK record.
Successful albums on the other hand have the variety and forward momentum to make you want to keep listening. This is a tall order, and so it’s actually not that surprising that there are only two 2017 albums so far that hit the sweet spot for me. On the surface, you may not think these have much in common. (And I can’t help but wonder how many people actually like both of them.) But they are both by British singer-songwriters who embrace variety in their sound and idiosyncrasy in their storytelling. They’re both albums that make you want to keep listening.
÷
Surprising even to me, my most listened to 2017 LP has been Ed Sheeran’s ÷. This is pure pop, and it’s not burning down the music establishment or anything. But as an album, it’s just so damn listenable. After one spin, I could have easily gone back and told you something about almost every track. (This one’s about his childhood friends, this one sounds like Irish music, this is the sexy one, this is the sad one about his grandmother dying.) There’s a mix of sounds and themes that’s just interesting. For a million-selling pop record to be this good is pretty unusual.
“Castle on the Hill” is the big ballad, kind of like Coldplay or U2. I don’t really love either of those bands, but I think Ed makes the style work because his lyrics are warmer and more personal than U2’s grand political statements or Coldplay’s bland triumph. He opens with “When I was six years old I broke my leg,” and runs through a series of childhood memories, tempering the nostalgia a little with some present day snapshots of his friends: “One friend left to sell clothes/One works down by the coast/One had two kids but lives alone/One’s brother overdosed/One’s already on his second wife/One’s just barely getting by.” There’s no way to know if there are Ed’s real memories and real friends, but they certainly feel real.
I also like “Galway Girl,” because I love songs that pack in a lot of lyrics. “Dive,” “Perfect” and “How Would You Feel (Paean)” are all romantic, acoustic ballads, maybe a little cheesy, but still easy to get swept away in. They’re also spaced out nicely with the other material. “New Man” makes an attempt at humor that’s not always quite on, but manages to get in one really good zinger when Ed notes that your new man “owns every single Ministry CD.” Throughout ÷, Ed raps a little, strums a little, and belts it out a little, and the result, while not life-changing, is undeniably enjoyable.
Wesley Stace’s John Wesley Harding
The other record I’ve liked this year is Wesley Stace’s John Wesley Harding. (That’s actually the full title. I guess he couldn’t just call it John Wesley Harding.) Wesley Stace is usually John Wesley Harding when he’s recording and Wesley Stace when he’s writing novels, but I believe this album is property credited to Stace. It doesn’t really matter though, because his talents as songwriter and storyteller are both on display. Stace is also lucky to be backed by the The Jayhawks, with their jangly guitars and Karen Grotberg’s lovely backing vocals. While there’s less stylistic variety here than on Sheeran’s album (no rapping, I’m afraid), there’s a good mix of tempos and more than enough compelling ways of looking at the world to make you want to stick around until to the end.
I featured “Better Tell No One Your Dreams” on my June mix, and the song has held up with repeated listenings. It captures the experience of dreams really well, and it also makes an interesting assertion: “Tell them your secrets by all means/But better tell no one your dreams.” I’d never thought before that dreams would make you more vulnerable than secrets, but it’s a persuasive argument. If dreams reflect our unconscious to some extent, then they’re actually kind of like secrets that we don’t even know ourselves. They make sense to the dreamer on an emotional level, but become tedious when verbalized — “People get bored/And when they’re bored they get mean.”
A few other unique conceits: “Hastings Pier” is a wistful, piano-based song that recounts the history of an English pleasure pier that seems to have had a tough time of it over the years. Stace entwines the history of the pier with his own memories of it. He then watches it burn down in 2010 on his computer screen. More upbeat and hooky, “The Wilderness Years” uses biblical metaphors to illustrate “castings out” — from a bad relationship, organized religion, a dead-end job — that ultimately turn out to be blessings. I love the contention that “the wilderness years are my best,” suggesting that a little freedom and chaos are good for the soul.