Heartfelt but bland: Ed Sheeran’s – (Subtract) reviewed

Whether by accident or design, the mathematical theme of Ed Sheeran’s previous album titles (+, ×, ÷ and = respectively) resolves rather neatly with – (Subtract). I interviewed Sheeran around the time of × and found him likeable enough but a bit out of reach. Multiplication did indeed seem to be foremost on his mind. Perched on the edge of a bed in a room above RAK studios in central London, he came across as a man obsessed with sales figures and chart placings, a coolly pragmatic mix of talent and ambition. (You don’t think Sheeran is talented? I watched him entertain 60,000 people in a football stadium for two hours with just a guitar, loop pedals and a lot of chutzpah. He’s got talent, all right.)

Since then, his hypersonic commercial trajectory has been followed by a brush with the hard stuff: his wife’s cancer diagnosis during pregnancy; depression; the death of close friends and family; and battling a spate of opportunistic plagiarism lawsuits in court. Concerning the latter, at least, he rightly remains undaunted: ‘Life Goes On’ is a thousand other half-remembered songs wrapped into one. He also steals liberally from himself, not least on ‘Colourblind’, which is essentially ‘Perfect’ v2.

So Subtract is all about depreciation. Not so much ‘less is more’ as ‘less is what you learn to live with’. In some ways, the spare feel is an artfully downsized throwback to Sheeran’s early days as a folk-ish troubadour, returning the songs to his acoustic roots, shorn of the rap and R&B accoutrements. ‘Eyes Closed’ and ‘Curtains’ tick the pop boxes – a little half-heartedly; in pencil rather than fountain pen – but for the most part this is a remarkably downbeat record, altogether miserable in places.