T
he world is a rough place. In the past we’ve faced natural disasters, world wars, genocide, nuclear fallout, and crime of every imaginable kind. But finally, in 2017, we have discovered something worse than all of those things: Ed Sheeran’s ‘÷’. An album so relentlessly shit, so impossibly, inexplicably, fucking awful that if you believed in a God before, it’s almost certainly going to change your mind. Indeed, to write this honest and impartial review I, myself, was forced to listen to an hour of the worst sounds committed to recordable disc – sounds so bad that, in fact, they invented a new colour that was beiger than beige. They invented a new dish that was plainer than plain pasta. And they out-One Directioned One Direction. ‘÷’ may just be the worst album ever made. There’s bad, there’s bad bad, and there’s ‘÷’ bad. If you’re feeling good today, it’ll cast you into a spiral of deep depression and if you’re already cast into a spiral of deep depression, I urge you strongly not to press play. For your own safety. Please. Of course, the first problem that one faces when contemplating listening to this magnum opus of awfulness is how to listen to it. Actually buying it (on CD or iTunes) is out of the question, but if you play it on Spotify, then your friends will see that you’re listening to it. Which is worse? Eventually, I discovered ‘secret mode’ in the streaming service which would allow me to suffer in privacy. Here we go. The album begins with ‘|raser’ in which Sheeran decides that he’s a Soundcloud rapper, clumsily stacking rhymes like a crappily shuffled deck of cards. He barely structures or considers the rhythms of his lyric and often pauses on a syllable or at the end of a line for an uncomfortable length of time. Seriously? Even children with no talent can string togeth-
er some lines that sound passable. It’s honestly like listening to a genuine version of Filthy Frank’s ‘Politikz (with a z)’ as he sings ‘I’m a lyrical spiritual miracle individual/ real hip hop is back, it’s the white boy who said it’. The difference is that the latter was a parody, whereas Sheeran plays it straight. Unfortunately, anything positive from the previous paragraph is lost with the mind-numbingly awful ‘Castle on the Hill’, in which Sheeran performs an excruciatingly commercialised love song guitar ballad. He is, of course, all too eager to stress his ‘common man’ appeal. Seriously though, Ed, we don’t give a flying fuck if you were ‘smoking hand-rolled cigarettes’ at 15. The reality is that you can’t write a decent song with any genuine emotion, uniqueness, or purpose – and instead subsist on shitty, samey, Chainsmokers-awful acoustic guitar that’ll pull in the big bucks but see you forgotten in music history a decade after your death. I can’t work out if the song has changed or not, but going by my laptop screen, it appears as if we’re now listening to ‘Dive’. Yes, it’s another excruciatingly sentimental, commercial, and entirely dull guitar ballad that sounds the same as ‘Castle on the Hill’. ‘I could fall, or I could fly / Here in your aeroplane’ – what the fuck does that mean? Or what about ‘And jumping in harder than / Ten thousand rocks on the lake’? Ten thousand? For a start, what an arbitrary number. And how do ten thousand rocks either jump into a lake (unless they are, in fact, sentient beings) or ‘jump in harder’ than just one rock or a normal person? And, assuming we adapted this imbecile logic, which we won’t, then how the hell is Ed Sheeran able to jump in harder than ten thousand of these rocks which presumably jumped in pretty hard themselves? Hell, how big even are these rocks? As these existential questions drifted through my mind, I failed to concentrate during ‘Shape 031