ED SHEERAN
Thinking Out Loud
Asylum Records *
On his new single, Ed Sheeran has basically taken Van Morrison's Days Like This and rewritten it as one of those godawful eternal love ballads so beloved of newly-wed couples and teenage girls. The sentiments are, by turns, soppy ("Darling, I'll be loving you till we're 70"), overwrought
("Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars") and kind of disgusting ("Will your mouth still remember the taste of my love?") Seriously, if this song was a racehorse it would be taken outside and shot.
RYAN ADAMS
Run to You (Bryan Adams cover) ***
For more than a decade, Ryan Adams has been tortured by the similarity between his name and that of a certain rather uncool Canadian rocker. (The former once ejected a fan from a live show for jokingly requesting Summer of '69.) But now he's decided to embrace it. The performance here only merits three stars, but Ryan's therapist deserves a five-star rating.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
God Only Knows
BBC Music **
It’s one of the most beloved songs in the entire canon of popular music, yet the BBC’s star-studded rendering of God Only Knows doesn’t hit the mark for me. The problem isn’t Ethan Johns’s arrangement or the quality of the contributors. But rather that the words “god only knows” and “ensemble cast” are forever inextricably associated with the cringe- worthy airport sequence from Richard Curtis’s Love Actually. (Why is Prime Minister Hugh Grant travelling on a regularly scheduled flight? And how does Liam Neeson know what gate his son’s 10-year-old crush will be arriving at?
A particular set of skills? NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE!!
PINK FLOYD
Louder Than Words Parlophone **
The closing track from David Gilmour & co’s forthcoming swansong album The Endless River is as long and uneventful as a wet weekend.
