Do not adjust your stereo. James Morrison’s fourth album begins with the sort of spectral vocal sample you’d expect to hear on a Croydon grime album, rather than one by an unassuming composite singer-songwriter from Warwickshire.
“I got demons” wails the voice, before the 2007 Brit Award-winner attempts a confession of St Augustine proportions: “I close my eyes and talk to God / Pray that you can save my soul.”
It may be the sound of someone desperately trying to stay positive in the post-Ed Sheeran era, but actually, desperate positivity is a good sound for him. Higher Than Here is almost Nashvillean in its godly striving, as reflects an epiphany that Morrison had after three deaths in his family.
Just Like a Child and Too Late for Lullabies show he’s nailed a particular kind of minor-major harmonic shift and when he sings “For the first time in my life / I know I did something right” on the gospel-tinged Something Right, you’re happy for him.
You’d almost believe him too – if he didn’t always settle for mushily generic sentiment. Saltier truths would have opened the way to true transcendence.
(Island)
