Sam Smith - In the Lonely Hour

Looking over the list of the potential recipients of the same award that launched Sam Smith into the unstoppable chart force that he is (although terrible album sales all around mean that basically anyone with a strong marketing campaign can remain in the top 40 for a month or three), I sort of feel sorry for them. Years and Years (probably the most likely, considering the award's not gone to a group before) (news just in informs me I was wrong), James Bay (this is why) and George the Poet are all of the hallmarks of what you'd usually hear about a Critics Choice winner: safe, carved for the mainstream and about as soulful as a cup of tea (with milk, obviously).

A telling interview near the start of the year in the build up to his album's launch told us that Sam Smith had never actually been in love:

"On Latch I was singing about love... but I've never physically experienced it. And I'm kind of sick of listening to albums about the turmoils of relationships, never having had one. So I wanted to write an album for people who have never been in love. I want to be a voice for lonely people."

This, coupled with his choice of album opener, does make one worry about the state of popular music and what's required to make it big, but let's suppress that twitch and enjoy Smith's fairly formidable talent.

I cannot abide 'Money on my Mind'. I am so sorry, but I will never be able to: that chorus is so shrill, it's such a simple way of making me wince and feel like I'm having root canal treatment (I've had it as well, and it does compare). I do get lulled a little bit inbetween choruses with the rather lovely rills and synths from producer Ben Ash, but - especially compared to previous earworms that proved Smith is more than able to helm a dance hit - this is too much. Perhaps Smith knows this too - the rest of the album is unashamed, sombre balladry, excessive guitar licks and a fondness for the piano. The main producer of 2013's winner Tom Odell, perhaps the most unconvincing attempt at a personality in recent years, Eg White, helps out with 'Good Thing': a song that starts with "I had a dream that I got mugged outside your house" and doesn't really go uphill from there.

Of course, there are tremendous moments. There are those who'd argue the standout song of 2014 is Stay With Me and you'd be hard pressed to refute the claim: it's just such a straightforward, gorgeous vocal layered over the same alchemy that made Adele the queen of 2011. The record's other singles are further little delights: 'I'm Not the Only One' has a wonderful live-lounge quality about the production that makes the whole thing much less forced, and probably boasts the album's most enchanting vocal of the lot. 'Life Support' is the only other Ash production on offer here, and a much more tolerable exploitation of Smith's falsetto, whilst 'Like I Can' is the closest Smith comes to the menace and power behind 21, and particularly Rolling in the Deep.

It's just that Smith is aiming for an album of Someone Like Yous, which can be fine when listened to in small doses, but a whole album of it is neither fruitful nor possible. I mean actually thinking 'Not in That Way' or 'Leave Your Lover' or 'I've Told You Now' are titles that suggest anything other than a one-dimensional fit of misery is rather shortsighted, and the songs themselves are fleeting little things that may, one day, find themselves soundtracking the fanmade videos of YouTube's most volatile Sherlock or Supernatural fans, but otherwise offer none of that personality, that experience or specific storytelling that's required to make a ballad emotional.

There is the general feeling that this a collection of soundbites and general piecings together of a bunch of friends' or strangers' or TV characters' emotional problems without any of the idiosyncracy or intimacy, or anything other than a defeated, morose whine... and to that I say "well. At least he has a nice voice."

Rating: 5/10
Highlights: Stay With Me; Like I Can; Life Support; Lay Me Down; I'm Not the Only One
Avoid: Money on my Mind

Artwork Watch: I'm not sure how you can expect to be anything other than alone on a stool that bloody small.
For fans of: Daniel Merriweather, Ed Sheeran, basically everything else to come from the BRIT Academy
Up next: The Horrors