‘How did it come down to this? Going through your call list,’ she sings on the deceptively breezy reggae bounce of ‘Hold Up’, before issuing what sounds like an ultimatum on the brilliant, Jack White-assisted rock stomper ‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’: ‘If you try this shit again / You gon’ lose your wife.’ The electro blips of ‘Sorry’ feature another killer couplet: ‘He only want me when I’m not there / He better call Becky with the good hair.’ Beyoncé stops short of singing ‘My sister Solange appeared to attack you in a lift after the Met Gala in 2014’, but this is still startling stuff which must be tough for Jay Z (who appears in the short film) to listen to. ‘Lemonade’ is officially billed as ‘a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing’, but the narrative is really one of marital infi delity. But it’s also a testament to her star quality that despite the many, many cooks in this kitchen, ‘Lemonade’ feels like an album only Beyoncé could make. It’s a testament to her star power that none of her collaborators blabbed before the surprise album release – Bey’s second in a row after her 2013 self-titled LP. ★★★★★ Beyoncé worked with so many people on ‘Lemonade’, her sixth album which she dropped in late April with an accompanying short fi lm, that its credits run to 3,105 words. It’s classy pop music to mope to on the sofa with a cashmere blanket and a bottle of something a bit pricier than you’d normally pick up at Tesco Metro. If it were longer, it might drag, but thanks to a tight half-hour running time, this album is the perfect soundtrack to your next wallow. ‘I put everything out there, and I got nothing at all,’ Smith sings with palpable sorrow on ‘Good Thing’. Underneath the production polish, ‘In the Lonely Hour’ is a desperately sad album filled with songs about the ones that got away and the ones that never were.
What makes Smith more Adele than Emeli is his uniformly mournful subject matter. New single ‘Stay with Me’ is far more typical of where Smith’s pitching himself. The frantic drums of recent Number One hit ‘Money on My Mind’ are deceptive elsewhere Smith trades in the sort of ballad where gently plucked acoustic guitars dovetail with soaring strings, and well-crafted melodies come as standard. To call Cambridgeshire-born Smith a male hybrid of Adele and Emeli Sandé would be reductive, but not entirely misleading.
This soulful 22-year-old first caught our ears singing on trendy pop-dance hits by Disclosure (‘Latch’) and Naughty Boy (‘La La La’), but on his debut album he’s a firmly middle-of-the-road proposition.
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