Remember James Arthur? There is nothing bitter or sweet to love about his music, yet all three are there in the title of this latest album. Bitter Sweet Love is likely a shock to many, as the works Arthur puts out are usually relegated behind Rick Astley compilations on the shelves of Tesco Express – but hold out hope for the man himself who tries to mount another charge of fortune. The comeback is on for Arthur who expresses his pop vocal range as Lewis Capaldi does and the instrumentally glitchy experimentations with indie flourishes as Harry Styles does. A middleman between the two is no life for Arthur, whose Bitter Sweet Love piece is meant to be a sonic force which propels him back to the top spot. No dice. Middle-aged women and Virgin Radio listeners will love it, though.
Free Falling calls out for help, but it is no surprise to hear how quick Arthur is to rely on the predilections of dense piano pop. Soppy stuff and a sign of the troubled times ahead for the genre, with straightforward interjections which are removed from the realities Arthur lives through. A sense of similarities and familiarities do not lend themselves in favour of Arthur here – who finds himself struggling to mark true differentiations between Blindside and Just Us. More of the same and tiresome at that. Plunking piano bits and an impressive octave range which, for some reason, is completely underutilised by the man in possession of it. Because of all this, the unchanged chances Arthur has peddled for the past decade makes Comeback Kid hard to take seriously.
If this is his attempt to haul himself back into the eye of contemporary pop culture, the world has moved on. Some will still linger but do so because music is something to fill the silence rather than art. Arthur is now a perpetual radio artist who never moves his sound on from what his established base already knows – and it shows in uncomfortably tiresome bouts. Arthur says it himself on A Year Ago, he is just somebody you forgot. Rightly so. There is nothing worth remembering here, a vacuous and vacant piece which has the trivialities and plainness of love in its simplest terms. The Valentine’s Day teddy bear of affection, an equivalent to trying to value romance as a chart-appealing number instead of an expansive experience unable to occupy the minds of those who see only financial acts as a moment of professing love.
By the numbers stuff from Bitter Sweet Love should not be surprising. A man who cannot remember to stick a hyphen in the title of his latest work should be nowhere close to the charts, let alone the email inbox tray. What a waste of a solid vocal range – as evidenced by Ruthless. A smarter artist than Arthur could get a song’s worth out of this entire material, but this does not pay the bills so the emotional core is segmented, fractured and at the end not pieced back together. New Generation is four years behind and has references to the mental health crisis spawned by the Coronavirus. Vacant, copycat instrumentals of a swinging country rock number, the out-of-place marriage between lacking lyrical vibrancy and a need to be in the pop culture sphere is telling of where Arthur finds himself, and it is nowhere close to the top. He may end his track with expletives of diminished value, but so too has his value and listeners will get no more insight into the artist after listening to Bitter Sweet Love than they had before.
