Up-and-coming singer-songwriter Benson Boone hits the scene once again with his new song “Beautiful Things”, another radio headbanger that at the very least is better than “I’m good I’m feeling alright”. I’ll be honest, I was not expecting much from this song, another generic poppy tune about how much you love a girl. Come on, give me something challenging!
The song starts out painfully slow, with him overly indulging in the sound of his own voice, bringing back war flashbacks of the elephant from Sing singing Happy Birthday. As opposed to just simple confident singing, he ramps his voice up to eleven with vibrato that sounds like it’s too cold in the recording studio.
Though soon, the beat drops, they reach the top of the mountain in the video, and the song really starts hitting. The booming screams of his voice, the bounding guitars that sound like how it feels to jump over hurdles, it’s great fun. It makes me wonder where this was about a minute ago.
The buildup to this song is really just such a bore and it’s a shame that it has to drag down the best of the booming parts. The band is obviously having fun with this sudden extreme crescendo, which translates pretty well into me going “OH SNAP” at these crashing chords, it really paints the picture of being on your knees begging for the person to just “STAY”.
Although Boone has the musical and vocal chops to really hit my heart, he falls somewhat short of lyrical chops, the lyrics sadly scream to me “Put me on the radio I beg!”, and I feel somewhat saddened by this.
The mix of the instrumentals and the vocals on the hook show me that he obviously has the artistic chops to make something great, yet he’s holding himself back to the status quo of radio slop instead of making what he wants.
Am I reading too deep into this? Absolutely, but still, I feel like if he spent more time on his writing chops we’d have something special here. Until then though, we’re stuck with a song that shows glimmers of pure unadulterated genius covered in a meter of slop for the radio.
