Sam Smith
The thrill of it all

Music today often seems like a constant quest for alternative sounds and supposed innovations, but without the raw material, namely good songs. Sam Smith is a young man who studied the roots of music, studied jazz and soul, debuting in 2014 with a good album, In the lonely hour, where he gave an elegant but pop form to his musical foundations. After that success, confused by the lights of fame, he decided not to insist on the easy follow-up to his debut work and retreated for three years in search of inspiration. In 2017, he returns with this work, where the difference is made by his astonishing vocal ability and the songs, well-written and equally well-played, without frills, without digital effects, but as it used to be done, with few but good instruments, including the "choruses" that are rarely heard today.

Too good at goodbyes opens the show between piano and very RnB finger snaps that lead to the "gospel" chorus: this is a consistent feature of many songs in this work, RnB in the verses and gospel in the choruses, a mix for the stars, with the voice of a white person singing like a black person (it's not the first case in the history of music).

One Last song is a "danceable" track, as lightweight as it is perfect in its simplicity, reminiscent of the music of the '60s, the doo-wop of The Drifters.

Midnight Train was immediately accused of plagiarism, with identical metric and harmonic cycle to Radiohead's Creep, but Creep was in turn a re-edition of The Air That I Breathe, a 1974 song written by Albert Hammond, brought to success by The Hollies: in my view, Smith is more inspired by this composition, still giving the piece "his" strongly RnB trademark.

Burning is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful songs on the album: a piano piece but with a very beautiful "gospel" ending.

Palace, another masterpiece, my favorite: it carries the "flavor" of Cohen's Hallelujah among the notes, and in the performance, I heard some echoes of the magnificent voice of Jeff Buckley; here too, as in Buckley's Hallelujah, in the background, a whispered rhythmic guitar.

Pray is a powerful and choral gospel, with a Smith who, in the finale, gives an aggressive tone to his falsetto, hinting at the possibility, for the future, of making multifaceted use of his voice.

The Deluxe version adds four songs, which are on par with the others and could have been part of a single version of the album; among these even the title track, The thrill of it all, another beautiful piece, with a wide scope, where we also find a beautiful "orchestral" section with strings and violins: perhaps precisely because of this richer arrangement, the title track was excluded from the standard version of the album, where simplicity and essentiality prevail.

In my opinion, this album is one of the most beautiful of 2017, presenting us with an artist who has all the qualities to rewrite great RnB and Soul music in a modern key.