Lewis Capaldi - "Broken By Desire to Be Heavenly Sent"

Like a house with no foundation and perfect plumbing

This Scotsman recently hit my radar after my wife showed me clips of him singing on TikTok. He’s got an incredibly powerful voice, and I couldn’t resist. This album, “Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent”, is his sophomore effort. His first album released in 2019.

The music here is light, vocals-forward pop. The Guardian also classifies his style as “Blue-Eyed Soul” - which is basically the genre descriptor for R&B and Soul performed by white people. I mean, it fits. Accompaniment is limited to piano, violin, and acoustic guitar, for the most part - basically 90% of what you hear is Capaldi’s vocals. And his voicework is powerful, often raw. He leans into it in the same way that Tyler Childers does.

The difference is in the context. Capaldi’s songs seem like they’re just a vessel for his voice; Childers’ works are collaborative, and the instrumentation carries as much weight, purpose, and meaning as his vocals. If backing vocals appear or the instrumentation rises up for a moment, it’s only because it ultimately helps Capaldi sound better.

Maybe that’s the point, sure, but it’s still so bare that the album might as well be a capella.

The one serious exception is “Leave Me Slowly”, the 10th track on the album.

With that distinction in mind, I now have to wrestle with the fact that most of the songs sound very similar to one-another - largely as a result of the pared down sound. The songs are good; frankly, there aren’t any bad ones. Capaldi never sounds bad. But if you’ve heard two or three tracks, you’ve heard just about the full range of the album.

So, yeah, it’s good. It’s also just not fun as a whole album. Break it up, scatter it into a playlist with some more varied artists, and you’ll love every Capaldi song you hear. Listen to this album straight through and you’re wanting it to just END ALREADY by the 6th track. It gets so bad that one of the best tracks, the aforementioned “Leave Me Slowly”, starts up and you almost skip it because it takes a solid minute for it to really get going and differentiate itself. Because I’m grading entire albums, not songs…Yellow. This one might have actually done better if it had been shorter.

Rating: Yellow