Bellbottom blues
Harry Styles is stuck in the past on new album, but in the best way possible
Fine Line Harry Styles Columbia Records
LOS ANGELES Harry Styles has chosen to use his superpowers for good and not evil. These powers were vested in him by the superstar status of One Direction, even as its members meander in multiple directions.
The most satisfying of these detours has been Styles’ full immersion in an era that predates him by a few generations, the mellow gold of the 1970s, which, when he released his eponymous solo debut two and a half years ago, made for quite an interesting dichotomy between his fan base and his bank of influences.
It was, essentially, Dadrock for girls. Well, the men would have got Styles’ initial solo music just fine, if any of them had shown up for the shows. The seats were filled anyway.
Come Styles’ second album, the question was: Would he chicken out and play more directly to his target demo? Sign of the Times was not quite the No. 1 hit everyone thought it would be; that can happen with six-minute ballads that sound like Nilsson, in the late 2010s.
Suspicions might have seemed founded when he released a teaser track called Lights Up, which was fine, but which sounded faintly contemporary. Retro-harry, we hardly knew ye ...?
It is a relief to report, then, that the Fine Line album makes almost no sops to sounding like anything else you’ll hear on the radio. The opening track, Golden, is probably an ode to a woman, not a state, but as the harmonies kick in alongside the slide guitar, there’s a hint that he’s been keeping spiritual if not literal company in California with Crosby, Stills & Nash — an influence that becomes more explicit later on in Canyon Moon.
But there are plenty of vintage English influences, too. Several of the songs have Mccartney-esque interludes, like slightly druggier versions of album tracks Mccartney might have released in his fruitful ’70s solo heyday.
You do get a couple more distinctly modern outliers besides Lights Up. The new single Adore You has a throbbing beat that makes it sound like a danceable answer to the ode Taylor Swift supposedly wrote to him called Style. And if you squint, you could imagine it’s Maroon 5 slurping up the Watermelon Sugar. But generally his blues are definitely of the bell-bottomed variety.
How blue is he? Styles has said the album is “all about having sex and feeling sad,” but both are a little on the muted side, as if he weren’t convinced he should be heartbroken over the breakup the record is largely about. It’s more an album about romantic ambivalence, which is a perfectly fine subject for a 25-yearold who’s still sowing some oats.
You don’t need to be ambivalent about Fine Line, though.