Guardian Link Spazzed so here is the 2* review
Part 1
Alexis Petridis
Sam Smith: Love Goes review – heartbreak album plays it safe in hard times:
Smith attempts to mix despair with euphoria on an album that delivers plenty of gloom but not much glitter.
Love Goes comes accompanied by a statement from Smith talking up its “experimental” nature and the collaborators who boldly “embraced my creativity and direction and allowed me to be whoever I wanted to be in the studio that day”, imploring fans to “listen with an open heart”, which seemed to suggest they might be in for a shock.
Such talk was hard to square with their collaborators, including Shellback, Stargate and Steve Mac, the latter famed for his work with notoriously challenging Irish collective Westlife and for co-writing Rockabye, Clean Bandit’s 2016 Christmas No 1. Then Smith told Zane Lowe that they were “not ashamed” that Love Goes was tamer, creatively, than 2017’s The Thrill of It All. “Because at a moment of such unsafety in my life, all I wanted to feel was safe. So that’s honest to me.”
So, bold new departure, or more of the same? It would take a superhuman effort to call any of it “experimental”, but the music on Love Goes sounds different to that of its predecessor: out with the retro-soul affectations and the nods in the direction of Coldplay; in with misty pop-facing electronics, gentle tropical house shadings and Auto-Tuned backing vocals. You’ve heard it all before, but there’s a lot of melodically solid songwriting – particularly on singles Diamonds and Kids Again, the latter enlivened by a George Harrison-ish slide guitar solo – and the occasional mild surprise, as when title track bursts from piano ballad into martial brass, melodramatic strings and backing vocalists chanting “hey!” somewhat in the vein of Boney M’s Rasputin.
Equally, you sense Smith reaching for something that remains stubbornly out of their grasp. As its title suggests, Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else) is clearly inspired by Robyn’s Dancing on My Own, and why not? There’s a compelling argument that the 2010 hit is the greatest pop single of the last 20 years, a brilliant electronic rebooting of the old disco trick whereby euphoric club music is paired with lyrical despair.
But in Smith’s hands it doesn’t quite work, largely because their euphoric club music isn’t particularly euphoric, four-to-the-floor beat or not: its solemn minor piano chords and synth washes feel opaque and mopey, and the disco string arrangement never quite spirals heavenwards, as if too careworn to muster the energy.
The lyrics stick fast to romantic misery, from infidelity to perfidious swine interested only in Smith’s bank balance. These are perennial topics for Smith, though as they told Lowe, their first two albums were inspired by unrequited love; Love Goes is apparently their “first proper heartbreak album”.