Shawn Mendes is 18. He has 13.8 million Instagram followers, 7.5 million Twitter followers and enough Teen Choice awards to start a beachside supply shop when his career as a clean-cut guitar-toting heart-throb expires in, ooh, 2018.
(Prove me wrong, Shawn! Prove me wrong.) He believes his second album “demolishes” his debut, Handwritten — which spawned the billion-streamed Stitches — and, well, you can hear why.
Ruin is a stark and shimmering jam that sounds a bit like what you’d hear if his fellow Canadian Justin Bieber got really into Jeff Buckley: a breathy falsetto here, some artisanal reverb there, all mildly sacrilicious.
Mercy and Lights Out are almost as infectious as the dread Stitches but there’s an intimacy — a “growing-upness” as termed by his British producer Jake Gosling, who also nurtured Ed Sheeran — that should win him that crucial crossgenerational appeal.
As music it’s overwrought, unoriginal and almost unbearable; as product, highly impressive.
(Universal)
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