Jamie Lawson, Jamie Lawson - album review

Download: Wasn’t Expecting That; All Is Beauty; Still Yours

It’s not hard to see why Ed Sheeran chose Jamie Lawson as the first signing to his Gingerbread Man label.

Sheeran’s troubadour instincts were surely piqued by “Wasn’t Expecting That”, a song whose accelerating momentum from first encounter through marriage and family to sudden bereavement occurs with a swiftness that’s disarmingly emotional.

Both wedding and funeral song, it possesses the romantic underdog charm of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” – and, in the cracked vulnerability of Lawson’s delivery, a vocal trope potentially as irritating.

As a songwriter, Lawson sticks firmly to his core business of romantic love, outlined in simple but effective coinages such as, “This heart is still mine, which means it’s still yours”, sharp as Cupid’s arrows. But the sentiments are over-egged in places by triumphalist orchestrations, which bruise the intimacy of his guitar fingerpicking.