Although James Napier handles the tracks with palatable electronic touches, the addition of Tyler Johnson, who has collaborated with Keith Urban and Cam, suggests that the likes of “Palace” and “One Last Song” might be Smith’s attempts at queering country. “I regret that I told the world/That you were with me,” he moans on that manifesto, still a lad of sixteen. The memory of the closet is cold fire – and a muse. The title must be a joke – thrills don’t excite Smith so much as pain. Avoid the Motown cliches redolent of Phil Collins’ Supremes cover (“Baby, You Make Me Crazy”) and one of the better examples of British soul emerges since the days of Paul Young, Alison Moyet and, on “Pray,” Julia Fordham. Three years ago, I tsk-tsked Jessie Ware for stooping to write with Sam Smith now he’s recorded a better album about heartache than Ware even as it also gets on my nerves before the final cut. In “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood” he even sounds lovelorn. On occasion the pose, to quote another poseur, feels like love. So long as the pose remains as musically beguiling as Destroyer’s they can keep striking them as often as they like. “Strike an empty pose/A pose is always empty,” he purrs in “A Light Travels Down the Catwalk,” and he would know. The result? The most unsettling adult contemporary album in modern history the only album by a major player I can think of that strives for Ken‘s determined unimportance is Bryan Ferry’s Boys + Girls in 1985. Whatever else, Dan Bejar has perfected this shit: an incongruous mishmash of early eighties Cure synth pads and Dan Fogelberg daintiness filtered through a profoundly unlikable voice.
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