Before listening to Wonder, I was a casual Shawn Mendes fan. Well, I wouldn’t even call myself that--I liked Señorita and Lost in Japan, and that was about it. I already knew Mendes was gifted at making hit singles. By listening to a full length album, though, I thought I would start seeing Mendes as a three-dimensional person, and not just as a cardboard-cutout in love. 

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. 

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Despite clear efforts to make something beyond formulaic pop, stereotypical songwriting makes an appearance in every track. Maybe he’s not just a cardboard-cutout in love, (Mendes grasps at introspection and reflection in this album too) but he’s a cardboard-cutout just the same. 

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Genuine feelings are presented haphazardly through cliched, repetitive lyrics. The only emotion he seems to have mastered is infatuation, which lends itself to shallower lyrics to begin with. He played with the idea of authenticity through “Song for No One,” but any connection I felt to Mendes was lost when I found out four different people wrote the song. Apparently, making yet another industry hit was more important than Mendes’ individual writing voice. 

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This paradigm is a good representation of the album’s lyrics as a whole. The one song that Shawn wrote on his own, “Imagine”, is easily the worst track on the album, both sonically and lyrically. He repeats the words “I can’t imagine what a world would be” over and over, backed by a humdrum guitar riff. At least it makes a good lullaby. Some other cotton candy lyrics I had the misfortune of consuming include: “your body’s like an ocean” (an extreme cliche), “I want to call my friends and go get high” (is this all he ever did with them?) and “dream, dream, dream, about you” (that was the entire refrain).
 

To be fair, this is Shawn Mendes, not William Wordsworth. And songs aren’t just made up of lyrics. In fact, when listening to the album, lyrics are about the last thing anyone would pay attention to. In what I imagine is an attempt to live up to its name, Wonder features over-the-top production, mostly made up of synths and drums. The majority of the songs follow a predictable pattern: a very simple intro and verses, followed by a chorus backed by synthetic effects and big sound. Admittedly, this is the pattern for most pop songs nowadays, but Mendes gets carried away with the grandiosity in the middle 8. I’d become invested in the songs at the beginning, and then, inevitably, the chorus hit. The noisiness of the synths drowns out any meaning the lyrics would have had. 

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"The only emotion he seems to have mastered is infatuation, which lends itself to shallower lyrics to begin with"

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Wonder’s instrumentation makes it sound like a Christmas album at times, in particular the tracks “Look Up At the Stars”, “24 Hours”, and “Wonder.” Nowhere have I seen that this was intentional, and this makes me take the album even less seriously. 

Not all the songs were misses, though. One of my favorite tracks was “Higher”, not because of its artistic merit, but because it was a fun, danceable pop song. Honestly, Mendes’s more “typical” pop songs landed better with me than the ones where he was trying to create something deeper.

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Even with the big production, this album is extremely predictable overall, using basic chord progressions and notes that I could sing before even hearing the next part. Some songs escape this, in particular “Teach Me How to Love You” and “Higher”, but for the most part this album does little to go beyond the basics, instead adding too many bells and whistles. That being said, some rhythms, in particular for the vocals, did catch me off-guard, which was a welcome surprise.

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Mendes seems to have trouble finding the balance between a deeply personal, introspective album, and a grand show of technical awesomeness. With fluffy tracks like “Higher” mixed with supposedly introspective tracks like “Song for No One”, the album seems to lack focus. Even the songs themselves seem scattered--they would start out soft and intimate, like Mendes and I were in the same room, and end with a relentless ocean of sound. 

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From lyrical platitudes to overproduced noise, the only thing I wonder is when I’ll finally forget about this album.