With some great pop pastiche and revealing lyrics, Whatever’s Clever is his best work yet<\/p>\n
\n\tIn a recent interview<\/a> with Rolling Stone, singer-songwriter Charlie Puth<\/a> characterized his career up to this point as \u201calmost a decade of chasing my tail.\u201d Indeed, Puth has at times been dinged for seeming too worried about savvily maintaining his image, whether he\u2019s searching for views by rolling out videos chronicling his writing process or hunting for social media engagement with shirtless pics. That sense of self-consciousness has carried over into perceptions of his undeniably well-crafted pop tunes, which can seem overly considered and even inauthentic at times. But his new Whatever\u2019s Clever is a great reboot, his most personal album delivered with an infectious\u00a0confidence driven by his preternatural gift as a top-drawer melody junkie.<\/p>\n \n\tPuth and co-producer BloodPop indulge their jones for buoyant pop pastiche, and you could never accuse Puth of denying us a window into his true self this time out. He fills the record with accrued wisdom and experience, both musically and emotionally. Album opener \u201cChanges\u201d sets the tone with Charlie singing about piloting life\u2019s inevitable directional shifts over radiant Eighties keyboard, a gospel choir that sounds like it just left the session for Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cMan in the Mirror,\u201d and a little Bruce Hornsby piano on the bridge. \u201cBeat Yourself Up\u201d imparts similarly earnest thoughts over a sophisti-pop swing that brings to mind Scritti Politti or Swing Out Sister. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to feel the joy\/And laugh \u2019til it hurts\/And thank god for every day that you\u2019re on this earth,\u201d Charlie sings.\u00a0On it!<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\tThat song shouts out advice from his mom. \u201cCry,\u201d featuring a sax solo from Kenny G, is dedicated to his dad, who gifted the young Charlie koanic coaching like, \u201cWhatever hurt you come across\/You better get up when you fall down.\u201d His brother gets a shout-out on \u201cHey Brother,\u201d a smooth bit of sibling tenderness that could sidle up alongside Bread and Dan Fogelberg on your sensitive Seventies radio dial. Puth recently got married, and his new love factors heavily here. On the beachy soft-rock slow-dance \u201cWashed Up,\u201d he big-ups his and his wife\u2019s shared goal of making it through any low tides and typhoons that might beset their journey. There are two lovely, Sade-steeped incense-burners about being in a new marriage: \u201cHome,\u201d with a nice vocal assist from singer Hikaru Utada, is an intimate image of domestic bliss, while \u201cSideways\u201d is about his deep dedication even when things around the house get shouty. Such images of finding solidity in real life contrast sharply with the piano ballad \u201cDon\u2019t Meet Your Heroes,\u201d about one of the ways that becoming famous can wreck the illusions that drove you to make it big in the first place.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tNot every one of the retro moves here lands as well as intended. \u201cLove In Exile,\u201d a yacht-rock dollop with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, feels like a cute move that\u2019s a few years past its retro sell-by date. \u201cUntil It Happens to You,\u201d with an annoying voiceover from Jeff Goldblum, blandly copies Phil Collins\u2019 version of \u201cYou Can\u2019t Hurry Love.\u201d He ends the album with a song that\u2019s at once the most meta thing here and the most genuine: the critique-assuming \u201cI Used to Be Cringe.\u201d Accompanied by some dust-in-the-wind acoustic guitar, Charlie looks back to observe, \u201cI used to be cringe\/Just so I could have a seat at the table.\u201d This moment of savvy unburdening brings to mind a classic joke<\/a> from standup comedy legend Mitch Hedberg: \u201cI used to do drugs. I still do. But I used to, too.\u201d Charlie Puth may or may not have transcended his days of cringe. But this record proves if the tunes are bright and tight, it doesn\u2019t really matter that much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With some great pop pastiche and revealing lyrics, Whatever’s Clever is his best work yet In a recent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,115199,134,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-568102","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-charlie-puth","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}