At nine tracks and just over 30 minutes, Bruno Mars’s first solo album in a decade, The Romantic, is part of a recent wave of mercifully succinct pop albums that ostensibly favor quality over quantity. It’s a Latin-pop-infused song cycle about love that practically writes itself: Mars is willing to “Risk It All” and when it turns into “Something Serious,” she breaks his heart until there’s “Nothing Left,” and then he begs her to “Dance with Me” one last time.
Songs like “Cha Cha Cha,” which works itself into a nice groove in its final third, suggest that dancing is Mars’s love language. “What good is beauty if the booty can’t find the beat?” he sings on lead single “I Just Might,” making it clear that being able to bust a move is a prerequisite to being his woman.
Based on his way with words, however, Mars is going to need some better moves to woo her. The acoustic guitar-driven “Risk It All” is littered with clichés and boilerplate pop lyricism: There’s no mountain he won’t climb, no sea he won’t cross—at least until “Nothing Left,” when “the fire don’t burn like it used to.”
In the past, Mars has effortlessly blended the old-school with the contemporary, but The Romantic leans squarely into the former. The arrangements, courtesy of Mars’s longtime band the Hooligans, are punctuated by bright guitar licks, infectious congas, and lots of brass. It’s hard to resist the nostalgic charms of the swooning “Dance with Me” or the “Got to Give It Up”-inspired beat of the short and sweet “Something Serious,” but after such a long wait, The Romantic ultimately feels like it comes up a little short.
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