A question first posed by David Byrne and Talking Heads has now been filtered to the scrapings of pop. Louis Tomlinson, the ever-popular former One Direction member, is back with another album, How Did I Get Here?. Through The X Factor, is the obvious answer. But he means here and now, the post-boy band life proving successful to those who have latched onto Tomlinson as an identity, rather than an individual with more to say than most in the pop world. He doesn’t have that either but there is always a chance he, like his ex-bandmate Harry Styles, finds a new genre or tone to play around with. An artist cannot continue churning out the same friendly-sounding, inoffensive style as can be found on Tomlinson’s last effort, Faith in the Future. All we can tell about Tomlinson from this album is he doesn’t know where he is and he has an unquenchable thirst for Schweppes.
Naturally Lemonade, Tomlinson’s opening track, is not about the fizzy drink. It’s an awfully predictable collection of pop-friendly noises formatted in a way that makes you feel he has a grasp on how to express love. San Pellegrino are going to love this one for their adverts. It sounds like nothing more than that, an advert for lemonade, what little nuance we could expect from Tomlinson lost to some hammy instrumental pieces and inevitable percussion additions which sounds more like padding than anything necessary. Songs like On Fire don’t reflect where Tomlinson is, but where he thinks his audience may be. Stuck on the treadmill of life hardly feels like honest comment from him. It’s hard to be set alight when Tomlinson works with damp matches. He has at least established where the matches are, so an improvement over his previous album, which was without light.
Songs like Sunflowers highlight the ongoing issue with Tomlinson’s work. His songwriting is built on basic rhyming structure and the dream of being taken away to some distant land to escape this problem or that attraction. But the problem is neither are established, there is no growth because there was no starting point. His wispy, dreamscape-like writing is hollow when it needs to be hopeful. But then when Tomlinson does have a decent message on his hands, the making the most of your days heard on Lazy for instance, he doesn’t back it with anything instrumentally interesting. It’s flat but worth at least a listen. Some of those twinkling background sounds on Last Night sound like a Ring doorbell going off, and Tomlinson must hope he can hide his lyrical shortcomings with some tiresome cacophonies.
Where Tomlinson had built at least some tepid momentum for himself and How Did I Get Here? in those early moments, it all falls apart. You can only play to the audience you’re dealt, and for Tomlinson, that means tattoos and cigarettes are a dangerous commodity shrouded in mystery. But even the target audience of songs like Jump The Gun must be fed up with the witless style Tomlinson writes with. Gratingly simple work and the worst part is, it sounds intentional. Sporadically, you can get a line or instrumental tone out of Tomlinson which implies he has chosen this soppy, underwhelming style. He can do much better than this, his former bandmates, at least one of them, already is. Pop is a nasty, competitive place, and works that don’t stand out with some comment or sound are destined to become immediate duds. Such is the case for How Did I Get Here?
