album review: 'wonder' by shawn mendes

I was not intending this to be a solo review.

Hell, I was not preparing for any albums before the end of this year to merit solo reviews, you think I have time for that right now? But no, sometimes you hear a project and you realize, ‘oh, there’s going to be no way that I can talk about this in a snippet in On The Pulse, I need time to dissect this in detail.’

And why in the Nine Hells would I expect that from Shawn Mendes? Even as someone who has had pretty significant ups and downs with the guy, he was never this sort of artist to me - he made relatively cute, mainstream accessible acoustic pop, maybe flirting with R&B and pop rock a bit. Even at his worst on Illuminate, before they shoved in ‘There’s Nothing Holding Me Back’ to gaslight people into thinking that album was tolerable, it was bad in a predictable way, we’ve heard this brand of basic singer-songwriter schtick before. And it was kind of similar at his best: he was rarely great, but the stuff that worked had a good hook or a nice rollicking groove or paid homage to his influences pretty well. I’d describe most of his recorded output as blandly competent - yeah, I’ve always had niggling issues across the board, especially in production, but it wasn’t because he was taking weird experimental chances that didn’t agree with me; hell, I didn’t think he was that kind of act at all. And for that record, that’s fine - there’s nothing wrong with being conventional pop, that’s where great craftsmanship can really shine.

But something struck me as amiss right from the start of this album cycle - for one, it felt like Wonder was dropping from out of nowhere, with limited buzz and promotion. The singles were getting pushed in a way that implies they weren’t going to slow down or delay this project if said singles underperformed… which labels would do in late 2020 and for the record, the singles mostly have. And the timing was weird too - yeah, his girlfriend Camila Cabello saw success pushing Romance last year around a similar time and it was a total mess, but it was clearly pop and was set up to do well even if I thought it sucked. The title track of this album, though… it felt like he was trying to make Harry Styles’ ‘Sign Of The Times’ and it wasn’t working - which makes sense, because his long-time cowriter Teddy Geiger was gone and replaced with Kid Harpoon, who is most well-known recently for working on the last two Harry Styles albums. To me, that wasn’t an immediate warning sign - I’m not a fan of Teddy Geiger’s writing, her departure didn’t strike me as ruinous - but when ‘Monster’ really soured on me, I got the impression this could go wrong in ways I wasn’t expecting. So I went in with no expectations with Wonder… what happened?

Actually, let’s not dance around this: there’s a reason why this is a solo review, and it’s not because this is what anyone would expect from Shawn Mendes. In fact, Wonder is the sort of daring but baffling album where for the first time in his career, Shawn Mendes tried to make an artistic swing for the fences, a swerve away from his safe niche in acoustic pop or even his tasteful rollicking bounce around it. What it reminds me way more of is something out of singer-songwriter material from the late 70s, where they were trying to pick up enough groove from the now overwhelming presence of disco to the schmaltzy and increasingly overblown sounds of arena-focused soft rock. Release this album in 1978 or ‘79 there’s a likelihood it makes sense - hell, it could even make sense now given Kid Harpoon behind the scenes and the fact that Mendes just got off an insane arena tour and he’s looking to do it all again… and it doesn’t work at all. And I don’t hate this album for making that swing - in a perverse way I almost respect the effort and the fact this is the biggest chance Shawn Mendes has ever taken - but it flies in the face of his strengths and content in such a jarring way that I have no choice but consider it a failure - an utterly fascinating one, but a failure nonetheless.

And the conversation has to start with Shawn Mendes and his limitations as a performer. I’m going to say he’s not a strong singer and that has a lot less to do with his talent and more to do with his presence and presentation - because if anything, this album shows him working his ass off and he’s clearly trying to show more range and I think his falsetto is better than expected; why he didn’t just go pure nu-disco and rip off the Bee-Gees or continue to rip off Justin Timberlake is baffling to me! What he doesn’t project is strength or presence in the mix: he’ll try to belt but it doesn’t contain any sense of fire or edge or swell to ride these arrangements, especially when you consider just how many sidelong glances this album is making at Harry Styles. We’ll get to Kid Harpoon’s contributions to production in a minute, but if there’s an artist Shawn Mendes is desperately trying to emulate beyond the occasional Ed Sheeran knockoff from 2014, it’s Harry Styles… but Harry Styles can sell confidence and has a ton of charisma, even if he is leaning into lightweight Fleetwood Mac riffs - he commands a mix, Shawn Mendes gets swallowed in it. But arguably it’s worse than that: whenever Shawn Mendes tries to sell these songs, he comes across as incredibly insecure in them - not just in the lyrics, which we will get to, but in how whenever we get to an abortive crescendo it never crests, or how when he’s supposed to hit those intense moments, his voice is pulled back a bit in the mix, which to me implies he didn’t hit the notes well or he wasn’t micced in a way to sell it and they had to clean things up in post.

But this isn’t a surprise - because Shawn Mendes’ template was not built for the scale he’s reached. Yeah, he’s had his oversold, melodramatic pop songs that might play well to an arena audience, but that’s more on heavier percussion than the arrangements or composition - hell, look at how gutless the guitar breakdown is on ‘There’s Nothing Holding Me Back’ when it could have soared or delivered a real solo. But that’s territory he can control, and when he can relax into it, it’s led to his best music - on the other hand, his worst music has come when he tries to oversell drama he can’t back up, and this album is that on steroids. But this is where we get into composition, and where I apparently owe Teddy Geiger a massive apology - one thing this album makes abundantly clear is that her contributions to structure and underlying groove behind Mendes’ past two albums gave them hooks and presence in a way this album just does not have to the same extent… made all the worse by how anthemic this project is trying to be. That’s another reason I pointed to late 70s arena rock - because the bloat and pomposity of that era by the end that hadn’t been smashed by punk or mutated by disco eventually fell out of favour because it collapsed under its own weight; ultimately just so hollow. And I hear a similar hollowness in this album: this is where a great performance at the core can save an album and provide foundation, but since I’ve described how Mendes doesn’t project that strength, he winds up trying to hold together arrangements that are too big for him… but since none of them have much in the way of complimentary groove, they wind up simultaneously underweight! The title track is the most obvious early example, but it continues across the album in ‘Call My Friends’ with that ugly flat grind trying to ramp into a hook that doesn’t coalesce - why does the kickdrum have no punch - or the clunky attempt at vapourwave with the synths on ‘Dream’ that had potential before the guitars and drums came in, or how ‘Always Been You’ drops the instrumental for dramatic contrast and it just feels painfully thin, or how the most dominant instrument in ‘Song For No One’ after the beat switch is the sleigh bells! The one time I think he gets close to making it work is ‘Look Up At The Stars’ with its obvious 70s singer-songwriter/Elton John influence, but at least the guitar solo here has some meat to it. Now to be fair, as I implied he does try to embrace more groovier, offbeat production, like with the obvious Ed Sheeran plagiarism on ‘Higher’ with some truly ugly guitar warbling, or how ‘Teach Me How To Be Love’ brings Anderson .Paak of all people onto the drums and the bassline is still shockingly stodgy… and yet even as Mendes can get eclipsed by his own backing singers, they sound the most ‘fun’ here, or at least the most ready for radio.

But now to the elephant in the room, the presence that overshadows the standard version of this album to a frankly alarming extent, in the same way his presence shaded and coloured her album last year: Camila Cabello. The vast majority of this album, if not directly targeted at her, has her as subtext in damn near every song, to an almost overpowering degree. And while I find that amusing because in my opinion he’s a much better singer and writer than her, you can tell just how paralyzed he is by this relationship; she holds the cards and on a fundamental level he’s kind of terrified of all of it, to the point where in discussing this album with folks, I had people ask whether he was still in this relationship - that’s how much his anxiety comes through this album! And I can’t tell you how much that feeling flies in complete contrast with the big, lovestruck moments he’s trying to sell on this album - he conveys anxiety so effectively, which we know because songs like ‘Mercy’ and ‘In My Blood’ have proven he can sell it, that it colours the sincere relationship moments and leave them feeling way more desperate than they should - hell, he calls a track ‘Song For No One’ and we all know who the hell it’s about, even before the overblown bombast made it obvious… but the third verse sneaks in how she didn’t reciprocate his feelings three years ago when he first wrote the song and it’s still lingering on this album! Or take ‘305’, which I’ve seen folks describe as a ‘Strokes-like’ and might be the biggest insult against that band since Casablancas’ falsetto sounding like barbequing a live cat - it’s really just a limp throwback, let’s be real here - and the entire song is about how much of a paranoid wreck he is in this relationship, especially as he can’t sell this with old school showmanship! Even the closing track which is so spare and acoustic and intimate centers his fears of losing her and being alone above everything! Hell, probably the most slick groove on the album is ‘Piece Of You’ and that’s because it leans into the spiky, ugly jealousy in the composition and content, even if the Prince-to-Justin Timberlake-to-Ed Sheeran-to-Shawn Mendes influence is the most flagrant it’s ever been. Now in theory, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing: angst and insecurity in a relationship can be a great source of internal drama, even inflated to arena size, and I think with the right control of atmosphere, Mendes could sell it, especially given how much of it is rooted in a desire to present more traditional masculine gender roles in his relationship, especially as a song like ‘24 Hours’ implies that he’s trying to put aside his overthinking and look towards marriage at his age. And this isn’t projection, he’s talked about this at length for years in interviews and while I’d argue it again reflects more insecurity when it overpowers the more lovestruck moments on the album, I think as gender roles evolve it’s a conversation worth exploring. The problem is that for as besotted and insecure as this album is, there isn’t the same degree of introspection into it - not just because Mendes is a pretty basic songwriter and doesn’t include much in the way of distinctive detail, but there’s no change or personal revelation or sense or growth or even something that would contribute to the larger conversation about masculinity where the insecurity he describes likely resonates with more guys than they’d admit.

And in no part of that conversation we need to involve Justin Bieber. I’ve already talked about ‘Monster’ on Billboard BREAKDOWN, but the fact this song is on this album and pushed as a single tells me so much about how this album was made and promoted… because without Teddy Geiger’s cowrites, there’s not really a radio hook built for this album, and Shawn Mendes is a pop radio act. My bet is that he made this album, it got sent to Island which is a Universal subsidiary, they panicked because there’s not an obvious radio single besides ‘Wonder’ getting the same marketing plan as ‘Sign Of The Times’, and they convinced Mendes to team up with Bieber as a late addition. Ergo, I get why it’s here - it’s also the worst song on the album by a country mile and while Mendes is on theme and can work with the atmosphere and production better than some other songs here, Bieber completely the project’s intimacy and doesn’t fit at all. Honestly, if I’m rewriting the album, I’d take Bieber off the song and put on Camila - explore her angst in contrast to Mendes, gives her more defined presence on the album, the complications in her own backstory would provide an interesting juxtaposition to his and maybe add roots to the drama, and it’d even have her stick in a register that would flatter her voice; it would be better than tacking her onto a deluxe reissue pushed in record time which tells me the early numbers turned out rough, that’s all I’m saying!

But to summarize this… this album both fascinates and frustrates me. I don’t think it’s his worst by any margin - the original version of Illuminate actively angers me to this day, whereas this is just perplexing in its ambition and misfire. It’s hopelessly derivative… but Shawn Mendes does have more presence and ‘voice’ on this album than he ever has before - it’s just a shame said voice doesn’t actively help contribute to the album’s strengths. It’s a project where I’m honestly torn whether I want it to be more or less commercial or traditionally pop, because it’s all the non-commercial moves that make this a failure, but an interesting one. The dramatically unfair comparison that came to mind for me was Paula, the disastrous album from Robin Thicke in 2014 that has way more parallels with this than fans would want to admit - the production direction is scattered and is at its best leaning into the darker grooves, the love story is painted with raging personal issues that overshadow any relationship, the attempts at bombast are flailing and questionably produced, the label probably viewed this as a nightmare to ship or market - and given the Spotify numbers I’ve seen and the Q4 release window, this will underperform - and dig even a little more deeply and it’s a weirdly uncomfortable listen! And yet unlike Paula, I paradoxically don’t want to see this fail - this is Shawn Mendes taking an enormously awkward step towards artistic growth, and even if he’s faceplanting, I don’t want him to stop trying. So while I’m giving this a 4/10, I do think people should hear this - it might be one of those failures that sticks with you longer than albums you even like. It’s not good by any means, but it’s interesting - and round out 2020, on that merit it’s actually worth hearing.