Charlie Puth’s Charmingly Compact ‘CHARLIE’ Is A Win
Catchy pop with personality showcases some of Charlie Puth’s most enjoyable music to date.
Charlie Puth’s self-titled third studio album’s central premise is Puth’s fluctuating, often frustrating endeavours with the women in his life. Running at only 33 minutes, it’s brief, frank and unapologetically direct — half the tracklist barely passes the two-and-a-half minute mark, though perhaps this works in his favour.
Puth has an undeniable ear for catchy melodies, and while he often flirts with the line between ‘earworm-worthy’ and ‘downright annoying’, rarely do any of the tracks on CHARLIE outstay their welcome.
The soliloquy pep talk on ‘Charlie Be Quiet’ with whispered acapella followed by the grunge-rip of the chorus as Puth limits the admission of his infatuations. Or the vigorously bouncy 80s synths of ‘There’s A First Time For Everything’ accelerated to match the euphoric thrill of kissing and crying (amongst other things) with a lover for the first time.
Puth’s penmanship allows him to craft easily digestible pop hits. Having written and produced the album himself, he often occasionally hits moments of monotonous or repeated sounds that when indulged in, result in the record’s cringiest, even redundant moments.
‘Tears On My Piano’ and ‘I Don’t Think That I Like Her’ sound like rejected boyband hits from a past decade — the former primed to soundtrack a corny teen drama series, while the latter falls into adolescent-like whining territory. (“I don’t think that I like her anymore / Girls are all the same / They just wanna see me fall apart”.) Both tracks remain fairly listenable but rely too heavily on the repetitive formula he employs for his music of building entire songs around a catchy melody and resorting to the Rhyming 101 Handbook.
CHARLIE is at its best when Puth’s personality is the centrepiece. His penetrative charm is often the saving grace of most of his tracks — who else could get away with a line as ridiculous as “You turn me on like a light switch” accompanied by the actual click sound of a light switch? Nothing about Light Switch should work as well as it does, yet its astoundingly-simple funky bounce and light falsetto make it one of the record’s finest moments. Even the dreamy textured Smells Like Me only really works because of his charmingly sentimental delivery of otherwise cliched lyrics like “And when you touch him, does it really feel the same? / Or are you lyin’ there, thinkin’ about the way / That it used to be? / I hope your jacket smells like me”.
CHARLIE reaches further highs when he refuses to take himself seriously or outright belittles himself. The laughably cruel “Ha-ha-ha” jibes thrown into the chorus of “That’s Hilarious” as he’s unwilling to take a lover back who “took away a year of his fuc*ing life”. Or the self-deprecating ‘Loser’, his crooning cries of “Oh, I’m such a loser, how’d I ever lose her?” attract an inkling of sympathy as he laments over losing his love interest. Throw in corny, aw-inducing lines like “I stay up like three or four nights, so I won’t dream about us / I wake up with no luck / I just can’t win” and a very Dua Lipa sounding post-chorus and boom, he’s delivered another earworm!
A vividly forthright and compact portrait of the ups and downs of being in love provides Charlie Puth with his most revealing album to date. There are few complex lyrics to be deciphered — his direct approach makes for easy listening, heightened by his knack for delivering infectious melodies with charmingly sweet vocals. CHARLIE flows with charm, personality and vibrant attention to detail for what is ultimately a fine collection of head-banging earworms.
