James Blunt camps out in his comfort zone on his new album.
The English singer-songwriter’s more than twenty-year career hasn’t seen him take too many risks, and his eighth album, Airplane Mode, is no particular exception. Mixing together a fairly innocuous variety of pop-adjacent sounds, Blunt doesn’t really deliver anything unheard from his previous output.
The presentation of the album is very mild – the production from track to track stays polished and clean, making an inoffensive listening experience that, unfortunately, through this quality ends up feeling quite generic and doesn’t leave behind many moments that are particularly memorable. There are a few solid songs, such as the opener, “Circles”, “Weight Of It All” and “Leftover Time”, which stand out more among the tracklist in general, but a lot of the songs end up sounding a little too much like music for commercials. The instrumentation has a deal of variety to it, but the different sounds don’t end up sounding particularly cohesive together, coming together instead to make an impression of a collection of tracks rather than a properly connected body of work.
The writing is also far from the most interesting, largely staying quite broad and universal. The highlights have better lyricism, with “Circles” and “Weight Of It All” in particular connecting emotionally in the intended way, but a lot of the other tracks fall significantly short and end up feeling quite pretentious. “Hey, People” specifically is almost insultingly preachy – there is absolutely nothing new or revolutionary about its message of “we’re all human beings and that means we should all love each other” in any case; even less so in Blunt’s sterile, unsophisticated lyrical phrasing.
Additionally, an issue that has always been present in James Blunt’s music that is just as prominent on Airplane Mode is that his vocals are, at times, a rather acquired taste to say the least. His deliveries become quite grating when he leans into more shrill or more nasal sounds, breaking through the overall neutral sonic impression of the album. At their best, the vocals are decent, though a little too polished and processed; at their worst, they’re a chore to listen to.
Overall, not much can be said about Airplane Mode beyond the fact that it is a James Blunt album. It’s a standard, by-the-books pop record that doesn’t do much wrong, but also doesn’t do much right beyond the basics outside of a few quality tracks. James Blunt didn’t have all that much to say even at the peak of his career, much less at this point. It’s vaguely pleasant background music with frustratingly little below the surface once you actually pay attention.
5.4/10
