The entire song feels like a failed sleight-of-hand trick, a vortex of frilly production techniques attempting to distract from the fact that Styles’ lyrics land somewhere between painfully boring and Hallmark-card generic, as evinced by the song’s woefully light chorus: “It’s ’cause I love you babe / In every kind of way”.Īs far as emotional insight goes, that’s pretty much all you’ll get on Harry’s House. With each successive verse arrives a new, self-consciously weird flourish – a rollicking horn section, some light scatting, a chorus of pitch-shifted Styleses, some ad libs screamed in an affected rock’n’roll yowl – each of which is more blatantly diversionary than the last. Over a lithe, vulcanised bass line, he basically vamps for three minutes straight – “Green eyes, fried rice, I could cook an egg on you” – as his band noodles around him. The album’s opening track, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant”, typifies Styles’ approach on Harry’s House. It is all bells, all whistles, no proper songs – nothing to prove that Styles has the chops he loves to imply he does. Harry’s House proceeds with an unnerving frictionlessness – it is an album with no raison d’être other than to telegraph its own tastefulness and its own self-proclaimed status as an Art Object, rather than a pop album. With a built-in fanbase for life and the knowledge that his albums will always make their budgets back, there is no imperative for him to interrogate his own process, or even to question whether there is a way to make “classic-sounding” music that doesn’t involve merely aping the classics. It’s an unabashedly guileless way to make music, but then again, Styles is a uniquely guileless star. This is the Harry Styles artistic process: identify the things you love about your favourite albums and simply acquire them or reuse them wholesale, in the hope that some of the ingenuity of their creators will rub off on you. He got the idea for the title of Harry’s House from Hosono House, a 1973 album by Haruomi Hosono, one of the chief architects of Japanese pop. He was so taken with the dulcimer in Joni Mitchell’s music that he commissioned the very same woman who played it on Blue to make him one to play on his sophomore album, Fine Line. The working title of his debut album was Pink, because The Clash’s Paul Simonon once said that “pink is the only true rock’n’roll colour”. He sprinkles his interviews with anecdotes that nod to his elevated array of influences. Styles does this with the primness and verve of a gifted child attempting to impress the adults in the room.
#SUSHI BOY CARTOON MAC#
Since leaving One Direction, the British boy band that turned him into a megastar practically overnight in the early 2010s, he has obsessively cultivated the perception of himself as a star out of time, a musician who has more in common with David Bowie or Fleetwood Mac than anyone releasing music today.
The appearance of having good taste is all Styles has craved for as long as he’s been releasing music under his own name. This cover is a bat signal for hip millennials denoting that Styles – unlike Drake, who lives in a gaudy McMansion, or any one of the Kardashians, whose houses all look like display homes – is a megastar with a refined palate. It’s not necessarily an expression of Styles’ unique taste – Melbourne share houses with the same living room set-up are a dime a dozen – as much as an expression of what is generally tasteful. The entire set-up is aggressively, almost oppressively, stylish. On the cover of his new album, Harry’s House, he stands in a living room furnished with all the au courant pieces: a lovely mid-century couch, upholstered in burnt orange a glowing mushroom lamp resting on a glass-and-chrome side table and a minimalist white lounge chair that, although gorgeous, looks deeply uncomfortable – a bulging disc waiting to happen. Harry Styles is 28 and, like so many chic, urbanite 20-somethings with taste and disposable income, he is getting really into furniture.
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