As Sam Smith recently tearfully confessed to a New York Times journalist, the songs on his second album were provoked by the collapse of a five-month relationship. On the one hand, this sounds like a pretty sad state of affairs. On the other, you can’t help thinking: ker-ching!
It’s over 60 years since Frank Sinatra poured the misery of his disintegrating marriage to Ava Gardner into In the Wee Small Hours, and the breakup album has been with us ever since. Yet they’ve seldom been so much of a commercial force as in the last decade or so. Everyone from Coldplay to Kanye West seems to have one – Taylor Swift appears to produce nothing but. The two most commercially successful British releases of this century are breakup albums: Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and Adele’s 21, the latter such a blockbuster that it spawned a sequel. When it came time to follow up the 30m-selling smash, the now happily married singer simply returned to picking over a failed relationship – presumably the same one that had inspired its predecessor – shifting another 20m albums in the process. You’d have to go back 40 years, to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, to find the multifarious sorrows of the failed relationship selling product in such quantity. Never mind, plenty more fish in the sea, and besides, think of the sales figures.
But that kind of cynicism is hard to maintain in the face of The Thrill of It All’s outpouring of genuinely moving lyrical misery, occasionally spiked with mordant wit. Striking lines abound: “Everyone prays in the end.” “I’m going to have to call my sisters … anything to drown you out tonight.” On Midnight Train, standard sad song cliches about walking away and missing your touch suddenly give way to affecting, clearly personal details: “Am I a monster? What will your family think of me? / They brought me in, they helped me out with everything.” Other tracks come at romantic despair from intriguing angles. Burning obsesses about taking up smoking in the aftermath of the breakup, aware of how faintly pathetic this act of “rebellion” seems.
On the rare occasion it shifts its gaze away from the vagaries of love, The Thrill of It All alights on an equally unlikely topic for a mainstream pop album: Him appears to be a song about Smith squaring homosexuality with Christian faith, after visiting parts of the US where the church still presents the two as mutually exclusive. The lyrics’ effect is amplified by Smith’s voice, noticeably rougher-sounding here than on his debut. It occasionally rasps and cracks on the high notes or takes on a choked quality, as if he’s on the verge of tears. He sounds authentically wracked with misery and regret. On No Peace, a duet with a singer called Yebba, his leaps into falsetto have a slightly unhinged eeriness about them, at odds with his guest vocalist’s controlled performance.
This is pretty full-blooded stuff considering the area of mainstream pop in which Smith operates– namely: the place where the Radio 1 and 2 playlists overlap. It’s just a shame that it’s accompanied by such pallid music. The Thrill of It All sets out its stall between sterilised retro soul – tricked out with massed gospel-like backing vocals on the choruses and horns courtesy of Amy Winehouse’s old collaborators the Dap-Kings – and X&Y-era Coldplay, whose shadow looms large over the echoing guitars on Say It First and the piano balladry of Burning. Unlike Smith’s vocals, which effectively communicate real longing and emotional distress, the music sounds like a facsimile of soul: the sounds are there, but any trace of grit has been expunged. In fairness, the songs aren’t bad – Palace and Midnight Train are decent replicas of the kind of lovelorn Southern soul that emanated from Alabama’s Fame Studios in the late 60s (had Fame Studios and everyone in it been thoroughly sprayed with disinfectant) – but they’re weighed down by the slick staleness of the arrangements. There’s nothing here that anyone with even a passing interest in pop music hasn’t heard umpteen times before.
It’s a shame, and a missed opportunity. There’s a certain power to The Thrill of It All, but it could have been a much more potent album if they’d laid off the polish just a little. Still, none of this is likely to harm Smith’s chances of replicating the multiplatinum success of his debut In the Lonely Hour. If Adele’s contributions to the canon of breakup albums taught us anything, it’s that millions of people around the world aren’t averse to more of the same.
