Harry's House - Harry Styles: Review
Harry Styles
is a British pop star and one of the biggest names in all of music in 2022. After rising to fame as a member of boyband One Direction he transitioned seamlessly into a massively successful solo career which has netted numerous commercially successful records and hit singles. Harry's House is his third solo album and comes three years after Fine Line.
Review By Lav:
Oh Harry Styles. From the massive backlash generated by One Direction spearheading the second great wave of boybands to the complicated discussion surrounding his willingness to blur gender and sexuality lines in his fashion. Whether or not Harry is queerbaiting, or has any sense of style at all is a discussion I am NOT wading into, but musically his early legacy is just as complicated. Commercial success was always going to be in the cards for Harry as the most popular member of One Direction but critically speaking he's been on a tightrope. His lead singles so far have been excellent. Sign Of The Times was perhaps THE moment of pop music in 2017 and Lights Up was an endlessly catchy and endearingly playful little indie-pop anthem. But the albums they ended up on are both totally mixed bags. So even as I began to warm up to As It Was, I was suspicious of Harry's House.
This isn't a bad album but it is painfully inoffensive, Harry turns his sights on indie music, more specifically the record is MASSIVELY influenced by Vampire Weekend with numerous songs in the mix that you can trace directly back to the VW songs that inspired them. While I don't think this is a bad idea in concept what makes the record more difficult to listen to is twofold. Firstly, Harry's attempts to match Ezra Koenig's brand of off-kilter intellectualism don't really come close to succeeding. Secondly, this album is inoffensive to a fault with even its loudest moments sounding like they're trying to be polite. This makes the inconsistent 40 minutes of the record occasionally feel like a two hour Starbucks grade indie slog.
Let's start with what I do like about the record, the lead single As It Was for instance. The song didn't blow me away at first but the sheer catchiness of the refrains wore me down until I can't help but admit I quite like it now. The gentle rise in excitement going into the hook is a really nice touch and I foresee myself enjoying the track all summer. I also really enjoy the record's opening track Music For A Sushi Restaurant which is a legitimately exciting way to get it started. It has a thick bassline that translates into a great horn sequence on the hook and the wordless chorus actually serves as a rousing moment despite the very obvious Vampire Weekend worship.
Matilda is the record's best ballad with an acoustic guitar instrumental that subverts a lot of the issues I have with the instrumentation across the album. It's also the best written song here that manages to tell a story in a genuinely interesting way that fits in perfectly with its backing track. The only other song on the record I really liked was Satellite which succeeds despite a few nitpicks I have about it. It's authentically breezy and enjoyable and on top of it, I find the refrains pretty enticing. The real treat is when the eruption of instrumentation on the bridge fires off from the song's most impactful lyric making for one of the best moments on the entire record.
There was very little that I actually hated on the record but from this point on it's really just a matter of how boring a track gets across its runtime or how obvious of a rip-off it is. Late Night Talking is a generally inoffensive pop tune whose most notable elements are its sweet hook and the nice 80's synth phrases underneath that add some punch to it. The good synth moments come back on the closing track Love Of My Life which is backed by some huge pulsating synths that set up a moment of grandiosity for the finale. Unfortunately, it fails to actually land at the end of the track and the record closes on a pretty flat note.
Boyfriends is a song that hadn't really left my brain since I first heard Harry debut it at Coachella because I was curious if he would play it as straight on record as he did live. Turns out he does and it's a moment I actually appreciate because Harry's intimate vocals and occasionally meaningful lyrics do really make the track work at least for brief flashes. Little Freak is another ballad and one of the only songs on the record that seems like it's actually supposed to be as quiet and reserved as it is. The biggest issue I have with it is the unfolding memories Harry lists off in the lyrics are so obviously trying to be Vampire Weekend's Step but they don't have nearly the level of twisting wordplay or visual storytelling to pull it off. It doesn't totally ruin the sentiment of the song, it just makes it feel very shallow.
We might as well cover the rest of the Vampire Weekend rip-offs while we're here. The listing of unrelated things for a purely aesthetic purpose comes back on Keep Driving and there's absolutely no point to any of it. The silver lining is that the song features some of the only verses on the record that are actually memorable refrains so I guess you take the good with the bad. Cinema is easily the worst song on the record and sees Harry blatantly trying to write an Ezra Koenig style of love song. He tells the story of a girl he finds so interesting because he loves her "cinema" and the whole thing is just embarrassingly shallow as a concept. He sounds like he's singing about a girl who is soooooo quirky but only because her favorite movie is Midsommar. On top of this, all the instrumental sounds like a worse version of two other songs on the record.
Speaking of rough instrumentals Grapejuice is purposefully understated on its verses but it all serves as setup for a hook that is quite a letdown. What's just as disappointing is that the song goes absolutely nowhere thematically or sonically. It's almost as if the little keyboard breakdown at the end is supposed to serve as some kind of conclusion or synthesis but it totally doesn't. Daylight probably has the most forgettable instrumental on the album and even when the crashing cymbals and wiry guitar riffs emerge on the hook they sound like they're trying to not wake the neighbors. Combine that with the corny platitudes in the lyrics and I don't care much for the song.
Harry Styles has an inexplicable charm. I say that because this record isn't great, it's boring and it paints Harry as a poser in the most genuine sense of the word. Yet despite the lack of true highlights I can't really hate the album, it doesn't do enough to warrant the hate. It plays it straight. Emotional but never vulnerable, personal but never revealing. Weirdly I find it to be something that no Harry Styles or even One Direction album has ever been before, ignorable. 5/10
I really like this cover but it has some things that could be improved. I'm a huge fan of photos with atmosphere and depth, this is one of them. I love how it's so open and gives absolutely everything room to breathe. While that's great for the photo I think that for an album cover it should have included some kind of text likely in the bottom left or center to elevate it from any other photo shoot of Harry. Since there are so many images of him out there it doesn't make this one stand out without branding. I like the tone of the image since that helps set the tone for what you're about to hear on the record, Overall it's successful but could have used some tweaks. 8/10
For more pop music check out my review of Camila Cabello's Familia here
