‘Equals’ by Ed Sheeran Review: Emotions by the Numbers

[peekaboo]

The singer-songwriter’s latest album sounds a lot like his past work and tells listeners exactly how they should feel.

Ed Sheeran performing in London last month

Photo: Getty Images

 

The staggering success of English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is so difficult to comprehend one can only recite statistics: He has the most popular song of all time on Spotify—“Shape of You” is closing in on three billion streams—and he had the highest-grossing tour in music history, pulling in $775 million from nearly nine million paying customers in the string of concerts that came to a close in 2018. That massive single and tour were connected to “Divide,” the top-selling album of 2017, which won Best Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys. The tendency to think of Mr. Sheeran’s music, which is powered by his acoustic guitar strumming and his flexible tenor, in terms of figures on a balance sheet is helped along by the fact that his solo records are titled with mathematical symbols. “Divide” has the two dots and horizontal line we use for division, and his previous LPs, 2011’s “Plus” and 2014’s “Multiply,” both feature the associated operators. The flurry of record-setting data surrounding his work makes you want to reach for a calculator in order to get a handle on it. 

On “Tides,” the opening track from Mr. Sheeran’s just-released fourth studio album, “Equals” (Asylum/Atlantic), the singer shares the feelings of uncertainty that came with his triumphs, and math is part of the equation: “I lost the confidence in who I was / Too busy trying to chase the high and get the numbers up.” It’s a stomping up-tempo number designed for clapping and shouting along—“I wanted something you could open with in a stadium,” he told Apple Music in a recent interview; he’s the rare musician in a position to think about such considerations—and it finds him reflecting on his previous album’s impact. Mr. Sheeran is somehow only 30, but for him that means he’s getting older, and he’s now married with a child. “Equals” is his attempt to square his desire for a tranquil family life and its associated pleasures with the reality of being a global celebrity.

 

But while Mr. Sheeran’s perspective has shifted, the music here will be exceedingly familiar to those who have followed his work. He may no longer be “chasing the numbers,” but his songs stick with what has worked before—musically, the new record has a lot in common with “Divide.” The secrets to his success include an ear for catchy melodies, a sweet tenor with range, and a facility with styles from across the spectrum—he’s a guitar-slinging troubadour, but he also raps occasionally and his rhythmic conception is informed by hip-hop and R&B. He’s a student of pop trends, and he’s proved remarkably adept at integrating them into his own affable tunes. 

Mr. Sheeran’s most winning quality is his legibility: When listening to his music, you never have to wonder what a song is about, or fret that there might be some irony or twist lurking beneath the surface. The content is right in front of you and impossible to miss. “Equals” amplifies this aspect. Each track is about something broad and irreducible—your first love, the pain of death, the joy of watching a child grow—and Mr. Sheeran lays it out in the most basic terms. 

Throughout, he trades nuance for clarity, offering songs that tell you exactly what to feel, but when you listen to a few such numbers in a row, it grates. On the second track, “Shivers,” a bouncy R&B tune with handclaps, Mr. Sheeran sings of the bodily sensation that comes over him when in the presence of his beloved. On the whispery ballad “First Times,” he ticks off the experiences he and his partner encountered together—“The first kiss, the first night, the first song that made you cry”—over a fingerpicked acoustic guitar. And on “Bad Habits,” one of a few club-leaning tracks here that shows an overlap between Mr. Sheeran’s aesthetic and R&B superstar the Weeknd, he bemoans his days of carousing but expresses gratitude that his tiring of the party scene led him to the woman in his life. 

Occasionally, Mr. Sheeran lands on a metaphor to express a sentiment and then squeezes it for everything it’s worth. On the tension-free electro-pop number “Overpass Graffiti,” he sings of a love that won’t fade and can’t be painted over, while the cloying slow jam “The Joker and the Queen” strains to find romantic wisdom in a deck of playing cards, making Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” sound like Shakespeare: “And I know you could fall for a thousand kings / And hearts that could give you a diamond ring / When I fold, you see the best in me.”

Credit where it‘s due: Each of these tracks is well performed and executed, and you’ll be hearing some of these songs at weddings and memorial services for years to come. But there are no surprises musically or lyrically—the obviousness is seemingly by design. And as the album runs on it becomes more wearisome—the final third is downright awful. “Love in Slow Motion” is yet another number about romantic bliss. And then, back-to-back, we get two ballads—“Visiting Hours,” inspired by the real-life death of Mr. Sheeran’s friend, and the treacly “Sandman,” a lullaby to his daughter. Clearly, these are matters close to the singer’s heart and no doubt he feels them deeply, but this section of the record is so unbearably sentimental it comes across as manipulative. You might even say calculating.