Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records was established to allow Sheeran to act as an A&R scout, giving a leg up to unknown artists. Plymouth-born Jamie Lawson is his first signing, and no wonder: the 39-year-old singer-songwriter comes across as an older version of Sheeran – a bit warmer and more mud-splattered, but similarly acoustic and absorbed by the minutiae of relationships. The opening track, Wasn’t Expecting That, might well have inspired Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud: sweetly and without mawkishness, it follows a marriage from first kiss until death parts them. As the album unfolds, Lawson emerges as dented-but-undaunted lover and occasional dispenser of platitudes (“It’s hard-won, love doesn’t care what you’ve done / There’s someone here for everyone,” contends Someone for Everyone). His unquenched optimism is touching, and most affectingly expressed in translucent ballads like In Our Own Worlds; though when he wakes up a bit and adds bass and a harp, as on The Only Conclusion, it’s a slinky and bracing counterpoint to the one-note tepidness to which he is prone.
