Ed Sheeran gets more than his fair share of criticism. Admittedly, the fair share is pretty large, the Sheeran oeuvre being well stocked with mawkish ballads and overbearing earworms. But the vituperation he receives goes beyond that.
He’s hyperbolically been described in reviews as “pop’s most boring man”, a songwriter with a supposedly “bizarre history of musical thievery”. His immense popularity, behind only The Beatles and Elvis Presley in terms of most number one UK singles, is treated as a machine-like facility for giving the public what it wants. In an age when chart pop is treated as seriously as rock once was, Sheeran’s reception is a throwback to old-fashioned anti-pop snobbery.
As a white Englishman from a comfortable background, he’s an uncontroversial target for ridicule. But there’s another reason why he attracts a more sustained level of abuse than, say, Justin Bieber. It’s the down-to-earthness that he projects, which has come to seem progressively less authentic the more stratospheric his success has become.
Subtract brings a pointed new dimension to that ordinariness. His prick-me-and-I-bleed album, it shows us a hurting Sheeran. “Eyes Closed” is about the death last year of his close friend, music entrepreneur Jamal Edwards. “Sycamore” addresses his wife Cherry Seaborn’s cancer diagnosis while pregnant. The plagiarism trial that he faced, and won, in 2022 isn’t directly mentioned, but clearly contributed to the depression and anxiety about which he sings. (By karmic coincidence, which may actually help its campaign of empathisation, Subtract arrives the day after Sheeran was cleared of wrongdoing at the conclusion of another bruising court case about alleged copying.)
Aaron Dessner of US band The National is the main producer, a go-to guy for stars seeking a solemn, indie-adjacent air of gravity following his work with Taylor Swift. The most prominent instruments are acoustic guitar and piano, tools of singer-songwriterly seriousness. There are clichés, including a song called “Life Goes On”, and hearty choruses that loom over the low-rise surroundings like stadiums. But there’s also a sense of coherence that was missing from 2021’s Equals, similarly billed at the time by Sheeran as “a really personal record”.
His voice is particularly prominent, with singing filling almost all the acoustic space. The effect is congruent with the disappearance of instrumental intros in the grabby era of streaming, but it’s also that of a person wanting to get something off their chest. Sheeran anchors it with a fine vocal performance, muscularly plaintive, intent on displaying his vulnerability on the biggest possible stage.
★★★☆☆
‘Subtract’ is released by Asylum Records/Atlantic
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