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Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran — young Brits in search of love and slightly better songs
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...8ce_story.html
Smith’s debut album, “In the Lonely Hour,” dropped last week; “x,” the likely star-making release from countryman Ed Sheeran, follows this week. Both men are earnest British upstarts with soul-singer voices and a fair amount of stateside buzz. Both have made thoroughly decent, deeply mild albums about navigating fame and love in their early 20s.
The most convincing track is the opener, “Money on My Mind,” an uncharacteristically synth-heavy pop song that seems engineered to sound great coming out of a minivan. It’s about Smith’s record deal. “Please, can you make this work for me?” Smith asks an anonymous record-label person. “I’m not a puppet / I will work against your strings.” Smith is far too mild to convincingly rage against the machine, but it’s heartening to see him push, however politely, at the outer reaches of his sound.
Sheeran does much the same thing on his inescapable new hit “Sing,” a collaboration with the equally inescapable Pharrell. “Sing” takes almost all the sounds Sheeran occasionally dabbles in — folk, soul, scaled-down hip-hop rhythms, sing-talking really fast over a beat — and tackles them all at once. Sheeran’s love of rapping previously made its presence known in awkward ways, sometimes in the middle of proper folk songs — as if he wanted to be Damien Rice but decided halfway through to settle for Jason Mraz. But everything on “x” is more accomplished, more assured and interesting than on Sheeran’s full-length 2011 debut, “+.”