The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Styles goes in all sorts of new directions
With his movie star looks and rock star mystique, it’s no surprise that Harry Styles is enjoying the greatest solo success out of all his One Direction bandmates. Yet his second album also confirms him as the quirkiest of the quintet. There has been no drive for big pop bangers, trendy trap beats or headline-grabbing collaborations. Instead he has tried to make music he actually likes.
With a team of LA-based writers and producers, he concocts charming offbeat ditties that glow with California sunshine, all melody, harmony and colourful, imagistic lyrics that don’t give much away. Styles claims the songs are all about “having sex and feeling sad”, yet they are jammed with so many references to strawberries, watermelon, sunflowers and cherries it could be a concept album about a visit to an organic Beverly Hills greengrocer.
His songs are charming but inconsequential, resolutely old-fashioned, drawing influences from offbeat singer-songwriters of a certain vintage. The playfulness of Harry Nilsson, whimsy of Paul McCartney and wayward soulfulness of Van Morrison all come to mind, with the proviso that Styles is not in their league. Acoustic guitars and pianos mingle with thick keyboards and live percussion, and an occasional burst of rocking electric solos. Styles picks up a dulcimer for Canyon Moon, a song that apes early Joni Mitchell, albeit without her intellectual rigour.
Fine Line favours touchyfeely sensuality (“The world’s happy waiting/
Doors yellow, broken, blue”) and catch-all choruses (“I’m going, oh I’m going, I’m going, oh I’m going, I’m going, oh I’m going home”), interspersed with the kind of obscure personal references that, bereft of context, remain opaque to the listener: “I heard Jenny saying/ Go get the kids from school” is a line tossed into Canyon Moon without a hint of who
Jenny or the kids might be.
From Father John Misty to Weyes Blood, there are way more interesting singer-songwriters than Styles mining the musical seams of classic Americana, but few of them have the attention of a mass, mainstream, young pop audience. If all that Fine Line achieves is to open up new directions for his One Direction fan base, it will have justified its existence.