Album Review: Jack Garratt - Phase

3/5

Jack Garratt has weathered a lot of flack since placing first in the BBC Sound Of poll at the beginning of the year.

The annual survey of top UK record-industry figures is a reliable barometer of impending stardom, with previous picks including Sam Smith, Adele and Florence Welch.

Garratt, though, has been on the receiving end of a backlash. With his sensitive, every-dude lyrics and glitch-infused sound, the chief beef against the 24-year-old Buckinghamshire native seems to be that his music represents a cynical amalgam of several popular genres.

There’s certainly something to the charge that Garratt is Ed Sheeran with a dubstep makeover. Under their twitchy electro veneer, ‘My House Is Your Home’ and ‘Weathered’ (“If I never let you go/will you keep me young?”) brim with man-boy tremulousness.

Moreover, it’s easy to imagine Sheeran’s undemanding fanbase singing along to such slurp-slathered lines as “I’ve clothed my fears in the fabric of your dignity”.

Still, Phase is not quite the dead-eyed bid for chart conquest that Garratt’s detractors might have you believe. Inspired by his girlfriend’s experiences with the sensory neurological condition, synnesthesia, ‘Coalesce’ (Synesthesia Pt. II) and ‘Synesthesia Pt III’ bring to mind The xx, if they were taking notes from Simon Cowell, and ‘Fire’ suggests — and not in an entirely terrible way — The Killers’ Brandon Flowers covering Bon Iver.

With a trucker cap and a regulation craft beard, there is an obvious temptation to dismiss Garratt as a hipster looking for the easiest route to the top of the charts. Judged as a pop document — which is what it is, essentially — his debut has plenty of charm, however. It’s a slight affair, twee in places, and, yes, of course, Garratt has been groomed for stardom by a mercurial record label. Yet Phase is not at all worthy of the opprobrium aimed in its direction.