Aw, ickle Mark Owen, he’s a nice boy. (NB he is now 41.)
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Katherine St Asaph: So much high-budget, fervently sung drama has accumulated here that I would not be surprised to find a kidnapped orchestra, three lost choruses of Les Miserables‘ “Stars,” a seraphim and a few white dwarfs buried in the maelstrom. Of course, that’d require paying the sort of attention songs like these inevitably drown out.
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Alfred Soto: The Take Thater has an odd voice: the insistent normality of a satellite TV employee. The electronic quaver helps. If British pop wasn’t so indentured to a post-Coldplay/Bono devotion to empyrean fantasies, Owen could be a minor Robin Gibb-esque figure. Maybe he demonstrated he is on earlier records.
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Edward Okulicz: Tucked deep inside adorable little Mark Owen’s aw-shucks low-ambition (but occasionally grand) pop here is a weirdly dark conundrum. “One by one, we’re gonna leave this planet,” he sings, and the melody is sad enough that the rest of the message (“So don’t look back/‘cause you know that it’s all just time”) is sugar-coating rather than arguing that there’s a meaning to it all. In the right frame of mind, if you don’t expect it to reach the huge anthemic heights of the swells and strings, “Stars” is strange and powerful, all the while in the guise of a wimpy little pop song.
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Scott Mildenhall: The last time anybody cared about one of his solo releases he was banging on about a hypothetical apocalypse, so with this it’s safe to say that Little Mark Owen has a penchant for big themes. He more than rises to the occasion, singing like he’s relaying the most important information in the world; information only he’s privy to. Clearly he’s aimed for massive and he’s got it, in no small part thanks to production more than worthy of words like “grandeur”, “swooping” and “majestic”.
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Brad Shoup: There’s a tension between the skipping cadence and the pop solemnity, a tension that could’ve been ignored were either part hookier. I’m all for pop men in their 40s trying to stay buoyant, though.
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Iain Mew: In 2005, Mark Owen released a single called “Believe in the Boogie” that was the source of self-mocking album title How the Mighty Fall but was nonetheless infectiously cheery indie pop filled with confidence. “Everything will come around”, he sang, and now everything has come around and he’s once again in a massively successful group, and he’s singing about vertigo and coming down from empires like he doesn’t really believe in the boogie any more, and tugging on heartstrings with every bit of windswept late ’90s post-Britpop nostalgia he can. And I’m an easy target for that but yeah, he’s a man who clearly knows his windswept late ’90s post-Britpop inside out and has the perfect voice for it. The chorus is earned hugeness, but I love the bit of verse that goes “waiting in the rain for a postcard from the sun/the one that never comes/the one that never shows/the one that never…,” the flow of the song interrupted to tug and tug with nagging dread, like he’s trying to feel out something horrible that he can’t quite take in. Also I like the blatantness of the steals from “Glad You Came,” like after the The Wanted took on his vocal style they needed to be taught a lesson.
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