There are 12 tracks on Charlie Puth’s debut album Nine Track Mind, which is either three or 12 too many. But no matter; the album is a smoothly executed pitch deck of exactly what will perform on pop radio in 2016, and Puth—pronounced "Pooth," and the slice through his right eyebrow is from a childhood canine attack, if you’re wondering—will do just fine. The 24-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate and former YouTube star of the acoustic-cover variety has already had three top 40 singles, all since last February: first, the demonic Meghan Trainor duet "Marvin Gaye," then, the Paul Walker Memorial Beanie Baby track "See You Again" (featuring Wiz Khalifa), then "One Call Away," an ocean of syrup that sounds exactly like "See You Again," and is the first song on the LP.
Charlie Puth is extremely talented, it must be said. There’s that Berklee degree, of course, and the fact that he wrote so many theme songs for famous vloggers before he signed to Atlantic. Puth co-wrote every song on Nine Track Mind and produced much of it solo, and the songwriting and the arrangements and the engineering are shockingly proficient, proficient to the point of insensation. Also, there is Puth’s voice, a beautiful tenor/falsetto soaring out of a throat that never coughs that frog out and as such must be magical. In other words, Charlie Puth is a truly excellent product, the type of artist that inspires wildly confident emails from anyone getting a cut. "Wrote the hook in 10 minutes," you can imagine his A&R tapping out on an iPhone (Puth did, he says, for "See You Again"). "Video’s going to be just Paul Walker clips and the Wiz verse, guaranteed smash, gonna do a billion on YouTube." And it did.
Like the best-selling (i.e. blandest) model home in the up-and-coming suburb, Nine Track Mind is demoralizingly well-constructed as a means to an end, and it’s because of Puth’s considerable abilities, and not in spite of them, that the album induces such despair. It doesn’t help that Nine Track Mind is all ballads except for three tracks, two of which are duets (Trainor, a sleepy Selena Gomez) that somehow still feel like ballads. Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment: The album’s emotional range covers the spectrum from light longing to light infatuation, contributing to the overall sense that Nine Track Mind is aimed exclusively at hairlessness: children, prepubescents, the discomfitingly waxed.
As he showed us in "Marvin Gaye," Puth lives for retro flourishes: doo-wop rhythms, sock-hop melodies, finger snaps, arpeggiated singalong piano. The album doesn’t deviate much from this safe spot; when it does, it goes blander ("Up All Night" is completely self-effacing) or, pleasantly, Ryan Tedder-er ("My Gospel" is a nicely rumbling One Republic facsimile), or, even more pleasantly, somewhat close to Justin Timberlake territory. "Suffer" is a credibly lustful piece of pleading, and "Losing My Mind" begins with a lovely, distorted Timbaland-lite riff that rings like a bell over Puth, who gets to take a welcome break from his falsetto. The latter track sounds like the work of an award-winning college acapella group; it is the album’s strongest track.
As for the rest? "Left Right Left," a love-ish song that sounds like accidentally holding hands with a coworker, is a ballad that assumes no one will listen to it. If you did, you’d hear Charlie Puth encouraging his romantic interest—"We’re almost there, baby, one more step"—to bravely overcome the obstacle of Charlie Puth, who is dealing with a set of problems that includes "walls," "long roads," and "climbing." There is a classic track in the So Sweet The Neg Will Be Invisible genre (it’s called "Then There’s You," and the chorus goes "There’s beautiful and then there’s you"). There is also a series of increasingly unnecessary vows scattered throughout the album: Puth promises to save the day, to never sleep alone, to stay perfectly still when the world is on fire, and then, in "My Gospel," he goes nuclear. "I’d stroll into a bank and put a ski mask on and walk out with a million bucks," he blusters. "Then I’d burn it in a pile out on your front lawn, just to prove it didn’t mean that much."
That lyric couplet has the approximate relationship to joy and meaning as the rest of this album does, generally. Later in the same track, Puth promises to "carry your body to the top of the tower to kiss your lips at midnight." What a tempting offer, and a typical one, in which your best case scenario is unconsciousness. You’d have to be completely sensible to pass.
