WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO “ED JONAS?”
[Video]
[4.56]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When I heard that inescapable Jonas Brothers song of Spring 2019 I couldn’t help but recognize the stolen skins of all the lite alt radio hits of the past decade, draped over a wan frame of a song in garish festivity. “Shivers” does something similar, but the catalog it’s borrowing from was already featureless enough that its thievery ends up being less distinct. Once, Sheeran was able to produce new and exciting forms of hackery. Here, he’s just borrowing from his own descendants.
[3]
Will Adams: You know, Ed Sheeran turned into a hardcore Bieber soundalike so gradually, I didn’t even notice.
[4]
Tim de Reuse: The sparse arrangement and obnoxious pizzicato melody recalls the stale chill of trop-pop; there’s some kind of acoustic guitar strums but they’re so quiet and have been so completely flattened that they can’t contribute any real texture. It’s the dead center of Sheeran’s comfort zone, and so totally unconcerned with anything that’s happened musically since the mid-2010s that it lives in a stylistic limbo. When the cultural nostalgia machine inevitably rolls over in twenty years and starts scavenging through the graveyard of 2010s popular music for scraps of catchy sound design to stitch together into hyperreal pastiche, maybe it’ll sound kinda like this.
[4]
Juana Giaimo: I don’t know if it’s the Gotye-like high pitched sound, the fake claps in the chorus, the “uh” that opens the chorus or the excess of harmonies in the bridge, but I’m not convinced at all by this. It seems to be a song by someone who has just discovered all the tricks of pop music instead of someone who has been in the industry for a decade now.
[4]
Mark Sinker: It’s taken him forever to strip out all the little personal quirks of his voice and infelicities of vocal rhythm that used to litter his songs and derail so many of them: he sounds just on it now and absolutely securely professionally generic, and it’s a bit sad, for a guy who kinda came up thru grime after all.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Ed Sheeran has proved that you can have a (somewhat) unique selling point and then abandon it and continue selling. “Shivers” is generic though, not just in the sense that it could have been done by any male pop star working in the same space, but that it doesn’t have any distinguishing characteristics and just feels like diminishing returns from the same template as “Bad Habits.” There’s some pizzicato strings that probably should have added some tension, but they don’t. There’s some strummed guitar, but you could have removed it and I wouldn’t notice. The hand claps that come in at the end don’t raise my arms any more than the rest of this heats my blood or my raises my ire. It’s just a weightless, atmoshere-less thing that’s there and then three minutes later is not. On this occasion, my admiration is just grudging.
[4]
Alfred Soto: A solid Jonas Brothers track awaits coaxing from the debris of pizzicato strings, but the salvage job would mean reckoning with Ed Sheeran’s vocal melody. As he edges toward bog standard Male Pop Performer 2021 ™ he risks turning into the professional he probably thinks he can become should people stop caring about his hair.
[5]
Nortey Dowuona: The way Ed Sheeran has righted my enthusiasm for this next album by simply creating better songs has actually left me at a loss: how can one go on and on about a song that has me shimmying! It’s already spoken for itself.
[8]
Oliver Maier: I don’t care if it’s mean, hearing Ed Sheeran sing about the specifics of making love to a woman will always make me feel a disgust so raw, so visceral, that I want to lift out of my earthly body and project into a higher dimension where sexuality, lust and passion hold no sway and the only force governing human behaviour is the cool, hard clockwork of a totally rational mind, divorced from want, a utopia of the super-ego. But like other than that the song is fine.
[4]