On “
Harry’s House,” the third solo album from the
colossally charismatic former member of British boy band One Direction,
28-year-old
Harry Styles often sings from a perspective that is a combination
of a prematurely wise elder, a personal cheerleader, and a pro bono therapist.
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“You can throw a
party full of everyone you know and not invite your family, ’cause they never
showed you love,” he sings on the acoustic ballad “Matilda,” a tender character
study addressing a woman who carries the burden of past traumas — at least
until the narrator gives her permission to lay them down. “Boyfriends,” he
croons later on a song of the same name, “They take you for granted, they don’t
know that they’re just misunderstanding you.” That song, which features some
agile fingerpicking by singer-songwriter Ben Harper, regards its male specimen
from a bemused distance, as if it is a category of mere mortal from which
someone as empathic as Styles is automatically exempt.
While “Harry’s
House” (Columbia) is more sonically adventurous and eclectically influenced than
most of the music Styles made with One Direction — the title itself is an
obscure nod to Japanese singer-songwriter Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 album “Hosono
House” — it shares his former group’s sense of generosity and devotion to the
female subject and, by extension, listener. As journalist
Kaitlyn Tiffany
writes in her forthcoming and highly entertaining book “Everything I Need I Get
From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It,” One Direction was
“a group of boys whose commercial proposition is that they would never hurt
you.”
Despite the open-door intimacy suggested by its title, “Harry’s House” does not have much in the way of furniture.
When Styles — who
was active in 1D from age 16 to 24 — branched out on his own, his most
successful songs paid more mature but still unselfish tribute to women. The
beachy hit “Watermelon Sugar,” from his 2019 album “Fine Line,” was a winkingly
euphemistic but sensually serious ode to giving female pleasure. Another swoony
highlight from that record was called, even more succinctly, “Adore You.”
Such devotion to
the feminine certainly makes Styles’ music smoother than the many pop songs
pockmarked with outright misogyny. But this other-oriented perspective has also
made Styles himself feel, on his records, like something of a cipher. This
problem was less apparent on the superior “Fine Line,” which partially
chronicled a breakup and allowed space for Styles to wallow, transgress, and
occasionally get a revealing jab in at his ex’s new partner (“Does he take you
walking round his parents’ gallery?”). Despite the open-door intimacy suggested
by its title, “Harry’s House” does not have much in the way of furniture.
It is certainly the
most distinct-sounding album Styles has made yet, and his production team of
Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson (with whom Styles has worked closely on all his
solo albums) concoct some vivid sonic landscapes.
The album opens
with the bright and playful “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” replete with horns,
a gummy bassline, and surprising bursts of stacked vocals. The dreamy
“Daylight” has psychedelic weightlessness and sudden crunches of electric
guitar that recall Tame Impala, while the highlight “Grapejuice” frames a
spryly ascending melody with a kind of jaunty piano and compressed vocal effect
reminiscent of “Ram”-era
Paul McCartney. Styles’ voice is sleek and nimble
throughout, favoring a looser delivery — he actually scats on one song — than
the flashy, belt-it-out pyrotechnics of his boy band days.
There is something
skylike about the whole album, and its 41 minutes unfurl with an air of
pleasantly stoned contentment, occasionally overcast by some gentle melancholy
that passes like a fleeting cloud. Styles’ current hit single “As It Was” is
the closest he comes to sounding genuinely troubled, and part of what makes
that song work is the tension between his muttered, slumped-shouldered vocals,
and the synth hook’s sprightly urgings to carry on.
The wedding-band
funk of “Daydreaming” and the lyrically inane “Cinema” feel comparatively
frictionless, and display Styles’ unfortunate tendency to write lyrics that
feel more like precisely posed Instagram carousels than conjurings of specific
emotional states. “Black-and-white film camera/Yellow
sunglasses/Ashtray/Swimming pool,” he sings on the understated “Keep Driving,”
the lyrics playing out like a stylish but stilted movie montage that takes the
place of actual character development.
“Harry’s House” is a light, fun, summery pop record, but
there is a gaping void as its center; by its end, the listener is inclined to
feel more intimately acquainted with the objects of his affections than the
internal world of the titular character himself.
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