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“Raise your hands if you sometimes feel as sad as I am,” urges Sam Smith in “So Serious”, one of the triumphantly abandoned songs from their third studio album, “Love Goes”. (Smith’s favorite pronouns are they / they.) Romance is all that matters in Smith’s musical universe. Love is very important and consumes everything, even – perhaps above all – when it goes wrong. Obsession prevails, even more than passion.
Smith’s voice is a prodigious instrument: a pearly chant, androgynous, powerful and defenseless at the same time. In “Love Goes” it is used, as usual, to reflect on loneliness, desire and regret. Yet more than ever, Smith’s music is aware that even as the songs explore being alone, a mass audience is listening. The sound of “Love Goes” is broad and luxurious: intimacy exploded on a cinematic scale. Each song seems elaborately elaborated.
On “Love Goes,” Smith collaborated with his frequent fellow songwriter James Napier; with Scandinavian pop pundits such as Stargate, Shellback and Linus Wiklund; and with Guy Lawrence of the dance music duo Disclosure (which featured Smith on the first singles). They built well-structured, instantly legible pop tracks that open arena-sized reverbs and sometimes beckon towards the dance floor.
Many of Smith’s new songs also arouse a new and strong emotion: the resentment of a betrayed lover. Bile and rhythm cut through self-pity, although it wouldn’t be a Sam Smith album without a good wallow or five.
“Breaking Hearts” is one of them. A soulful hymn with shades by Sam Cooke written with Napier, who weeps for his recriminations. “You’ve been busted,” Smith sings with equal parts of accusation and melancholy, as he heads for a chorus – “While you were busy breaking hearts / I was busy breaking – this gives himself a few snaps of his fingers but can’t fend off his. In “Another One,” Smith sings to an ex with honey sarcasm (“Oh congratulations, you found that”) and sounds relieved that “I dodged a bullet”; soon, when a foursome thud materializes on the floor , Smith tells the ex how much he should have done better.
“Diamonds” directly accuses an ex whose intentions turned out to be purely materialistic. “Now I know what you love me for,” sings Smith, provoking, “Show me how little you care.” The rhythm places the song in the lineage of angry disco kisses like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”, but there is also a pain in Smith’s voice, admitting some self-deception: “I think I always knew,” Smith admits. . “Dance (‘Til You Love Someone Else)” mixes vintage electro and disco – even a string section – with 21st century vocal manipulations, as Smith resolutely seeks a rebound: “Someone beats me,” they plead.
The album title song, “Love Goes,” is a preemptive strike, a break before things get too serious. Like many of Smith’s songs, it starts with a solitary keyboard playing simple patterns; the production makes it clear that he is a loop, not a person. “You are destroyed, we know”, realizes the singer. “And if you knew you wouldn’t fight me when I say goodbye.” It’s just a handful of instruments and an intimate voice until, suddenly, it’s no more: it enters an ensemble of brass, wide open voices, massed strings. Personal interaction suddenly becomes a public performance, with the power of pop.
Sam Smith
“Love Goes”
(Capitol)
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