December 2020 - Music

 Album of the Month - Wonder by Shawn Mendes

One of the most surreal moments in a music documentary from this most surreal year happens during the closing stretch of director Grant Singer’s new Netflix film, Shawn Mendes: In Wonder — which chronicles the making of the 22-year-old Toronto singer-songwriter’s fourth album, Wonder, and the world tour that carried him across five continents throughout 2019 — as Shawn sits mute and despondent, pecking away at his iPhone, and its disembodied text-to-speech voice delivers a soliloquy: “These next ten years are when everything I do is going full speed. It’s like an athlete in their prime. I have to keep going.” We’re immediately transported to a misty shore where Mendes greets the cloudy skies with open arms, acoustic guitar strumming intensely in the background, as if to say he’s ready to weather the storm and move on. 

Wonder is Shawn Mendes’s headphone album, full of intriguing tones, lush textures, and unexpected twists. They’re short and sweet, but they never feel like a race to the refrain, like “Treat You Better” and “Mercy,” hit singles with choruses so massive everything in between feels ancillary, like the complimentary bread before a hearty meal at a restaurant. You think “Song for No One” is going to stay a plaintive ballad until it blows your earbuds out with a booming orchestral coda. “Call My Friends” pump fakes with an unassuming piano line and then smacks the chorus out of the park with the kind of beefy synth, fuzz bass, and drum work you’d sooner find on a twenty one pilots record.