ALBUM REVIEWS
Shawn Mendes Shawn Mendes Island Records
Mendes’ self-titled third album follows the successes of Handwritten and Illuminate, which both topped the Billboard 200 albums chart. The album opens unconventionally for a pop collection, with Mendes fighting depression in the Kings of Leonsounding rocker In My Blood. Mendes gets in a welcome R&B groove for the lovely, aching Lost in Japan and goes on to admit self-consciousness in Nervous and vulnerability in Where Were You in the Morning ?
He teams up with Khalid on Youth, a stunningly beautiful union of two of the most exciting millennial voices pushing back against the old order: “You can’t take my youth away/This soul of mine will never break.”
Snow Patrol Wildness Polydor/Republic
Lead singer Gary Lightbody looks backward to his youth, confronts his battles with alcohol and depression, and the result is a fantastically ambitious collection of songs, one more direct and intimate than many previous Snow Patrol offerings.
Album opener Life on Earth is majestic and grand, both personal and yet universal, carried by a string quartet and drum flourishes. It’s bold and brilliant. A few songs later, it’s just Lightbody and Johnny McDaid on piano for the exquisite, stripped-down What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get?
Lightbody looks backward, in the nicely layered A Youth Written in Fire (“Remember the first time that we kissed?”) and pours so much heartache into the stirring and intimate Don’t Give In that he seems to be singing about himself.
CHVRCHES Love Is Dead Glassnote Records
Two very different artists are offering songs titled God’s Plan this year. Drake for one, and the Scottish synth pop group CHVRCHES — the latter producing a great, hypnotic gem.
God’s Plan is part of the sonically bright but thematically still gloriously dark Love Is Dead, the trio’s third album.
Those thick, suffocating blankets of synth from 2013’s
The Bones of What You Believe have been hacked away, offering a cleaner, lighter and more commercial sound.
Lyrically, the band is at its best, exploring man’s inhumanity to man while still making highenergy songs.
The best song is the first single, Miracle.
The album ends with Wonderland, a perfect summation of CHVRCHES, crisp poppy delight with the whiplash lyrics: “We live in a wonderland,” Mayberry sings, before adding: “Like blood isn’t on our hands.”