Ed Sheeran has been through some shit. No matter your opinion on the ginger pop colossus – and given his rampant success, opinions understandably vary – it would take the churlish, the cynical, and the downright inhumane to disregard his experiences of the past few years. The loss of close friend Jamal Edwards struck his to the core, before a flurry of legal travails brought his work into question. And then his wife – Cherry Seaborn – was diagnosed with cancer, while six months pregnant with the couple’s second child.
‘Subtract’ – the final part of his mathematics series – is the result. Largely shorn of the gloss which took him to stratospheric heights, it’s little more than man and guitar. The results are affecting, but – and this remains Ed Sheeran, after all – not devoid of schmaltz. For all the yearning for emotional resolution in the songwriting, it’s often expressed in simplistic terms. This is pop, though – it’s a genre of broad brushstrokes, and that is the lingua fraca Ed Sheeran has long time drawn into his core.
‘Boat’ sets the tone. Acoustic, with a slight celtic colouring, The strings surge underneath, offering both a cushion, and a feeling of weight. Simple yet effective, it finds Ed Sheeran cutting to the heart of the matter, singing: “it’s beauty but its bleak…”
The nautical themes – adrift, stormy seas, dangerous currents – continue throughout the record, notably on follow-up cut ‘Salt Water’. Plaintive and affecting, it pivots between musical politeness and abruptly stark lyricism: “Standing on the edge,” he murmurs, “gazing into hell…”
In spite of the daunting lyrical matter, ‘-‘ is often one of Ed Sheeran’s more overly pretty records. His undeniable gift for melody permeates the record – ‘Plucked Strings’ has a beatific quality, while ‘Life Goes On’ is an almost pastoral urge towards clarity.
—
—
Produced by Aaron Dessnor, some have immediately begun to view ‘Subtract’ as Sheeran’s ‘folklore’, the equivalent acoustic cycle the producer worked on alongside Taylor Swift. The parallels are too neat to miss: removing the gloss, exposing the songwriting underneath, and swapping pop for a more ‘serious’ artform. The comparisons fall short on tracks like ‘Dusty’ though – electronic in tone, and often unsettling, it’s one of the project’s more dissonant, complex moments.
The ruminative ‘End Of Youth’ – “it’s been a long year” – takes Ed Sheeran back to type, the whisper soft arrangement mirrored to soul-baring lyrics. ‘Colourblind’ retains a nursery rhyme feel, recalling those vintage Disney themes in its search for innocent purity. ‘Curtains’ suggests a spell in therapy, and the need to do the work, to put in the hours to find some form of balance, before ‘Borderline’ and ‘Spark’ try to bring the record’s over-arching themes to the surface.
If making this provided Ed Sheeran with some needed closure, then it’s clear where it was found. ‘Vega’ may look to the stars, but it’s actually a coded reference to his first child, while ‘Sycamore’ learns to look to small wins, for life’s tiny pleasures. The process of re-rooting himself evidently wasn’t easy – and perhaps particularly tough for a touring musician – but it’s resulted in some of the best music of his career. Take finale ‘Hills Of Aberfeldy’ – an unornamented, unadorned folk hymnal, it’s simply voice, guitar, and violin, the rise and fall of the melody, its sudden stop proving to have all the effectiveness, the impact of his stadium-sized productions. Unsheathing himself from the gloss of his prior work, Ed Sheeran has delivered a statement of great truth.
7/10
Words: Robin Murray
—
