Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Shawn Mendes, Universal Music 2020.
Canadian singer/songwriter Shawn Mendes has achieved some impressive highs in his short career.
His first album, Handwritten (2015), debuted at #1 in the Billboard top 200 when he was just 18 years of age.
He followed that up with Illuminate (2016) also debuting at #1 and his third Self-Titled album (2018) repeated the feat.
In December 2020 Mendes did it again when Wonder also topped the charts on debut making him the youngest male artist ever to top the Billboard 200 charts with his first four albums.
Naturally he’s also cleaned up the awards having amassed 13 SOCAN Awards, 10 MTV Europe Music Awards, eight Juno awards, eight iHeartRadio MMVAs, two American Music Awards and three Grammy Nominations.
All this and he’s only 22 years old.
One listen to Wonder goes some way to explain this phenomenal rise to prominence.
There is little doubt that Shawn Mendes is a remarkably talented musician.
As a young teenager he taught himself to play guitar via YouTube tutorials and by the time he’d reached 15 he was posting videos of himself doing Justin Bieber covers.
Within a year he was the third most watched musician on Vine.
All this tells us that he is not only talented but he has that all important ingredient for success, command of the medium and an insatiable drive for recognition.
Shawn has soaked up all the tricks of the pop industry and they come out in his songs.
Each track is carefully crafted; musically sculptured with every pop contrivance to make them instantly appealing.
In fact they are so perfectly formed that you’d think they must have been the outcome of the combined talents of many of the best songwriters in the business and not a precociously talented 22 year old.
It’s been some time since I’ve listened to an album that is so complete and so consistent in its execution.
Every track on Wonder is a pop masterpiece.
Shawn Mendes is a pop superstar and it’ll be interesting to follow his career as he deals with everything that that entails.
