Is This Review Of Shawn Mendes’ New Album The Most Brutal Of The Year?
"Mendes’ elevation of Cabello as his eternal muse is surely meant to be romantic, but it comes across as naive - and vaguely terrifying."
Pretty much since its inception way back in 1995, Pitchfork has become known for publishing some of the most inventively barbed takedowns ever unleashed upon the music industry.
Who can forget, for instance, the site’s “review” of Jet’s Shine On, a 0.0 rating accompanied by a video of a monkey drinking his own piss and literally nothing else? Or how about the lashings levelled out against ex-One Direction member Liam Payne, whose album LP1 was described as being suited for changing rooms?
Well, almost precisely a year after that Payne brutality, Pitchfork has one again turned their sights on a major pop superstar — this time, it’s Shawn Mendes and his new record Wonder under the hot stagelights, and ho boy does he get an earful.
The review, penned by staff writer Quinn Moreland, directs most of the ire at the album’s thematic work. Wonder is a record about love — more specifically, Mendes’ love for his partner Camila Cabello — but Moreland describes it as being hideously one note. “Mendes comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored,” she writes.
“It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day,” Moreland writeres. “At one point he croons that he “heard that once a wise man said, ‘Only fools go rushing in,’” as if this is supposed to be a seismic revelation.” Ouch.
Moreland goes on: “Mendes’ elevation of Cabello as his eternal muse is surely meant to be romantic, but it comes across as naive — and vaguely terrifying.”
Not that the production itself gets off easily; Moreland describes it as attempting to “compensate for lyrical blandness by forcibly inserting drama.”
But the worst crime of all, according to Moreland? Wonder just doesn’t reveal anything. “Near the end of Wonder, Mendes refers to ‘the boy who’s really underneath/all the scars and insecurities.’ Who is that?”
It’s an excellent piece of criticism — short, compact and utterly merciless in the way that it unravels the flaws of a subtly doomed record. Read the whole thing here.