Last fall, “The Fall” seemed to appear out of nowhere, a tantalizing, faceless wisp of sultry R&B without a bio blurb’s worth of context. As details slowly congealed leading up to the release of Rhye’s excellent debut album Woman this past March, many listeners were introduced to Michael Milosh, the man—and yes, many were reluctant to believe, that’s totally a dude—who was effortlessly braiding his voice through Robin Hannibal’s silky tracks. Milosh has been producing and releasing his own music for nearly a decade via L.A.’s Plug Research, a label with an aesthetic of high-polish adult contempo grooves personified by the Toronto transplant. That same voice is in peak form on Jetlag, but if you discovered Milosh via Rhye, don’t expect to hear it surrounded by the same kind of sultry soul. Left to his own devices, Milosh prefers chillier confines.
First, a word on that voice, which—stay with me here—reminds me of no less than Michael McDonald, in a specific and positive way. The two evoke different types of soul—McDonald’s furry baritone is a simulacrum of church-trained 60s and 70s belters while Milosh’s lithe countertenor owes much more to the hushed tones of Quiet Storm legends Sade and Anita Baker—but they’re equally transfixing, in a way that suggests an uncannily human android programmed to the “soul” setting. Each voice doesn’t sound like the product of training as much as something that automatically emanated the first time they set themselves to try and sing. Much in the same manner that McDonald manifested his alien instrument as a radiant background production cog on Steely Dan’s infinitely layered productions, Milosh prefers to highlight the otherworldly affects of his voice. At several points on Jetlag, he ceases singing words and simply weaves his wordless croon amidst the other ProTool layers, creating the sensation that you’re driving past his voice as it sits on the side of a highway at night. Milosh’s skill in twisting and stretching his voice is his greatest gift as an artist. The way he and Hannibal gently interweave layers of these feather-light sighs at the start of “Major Minor Love", for instance, is a highlight of the Rhye LP.
Milosh’s crisp electronic soundscapes work mainly as contrast, immaculate bedding designed to melt away as his warm voice slithers in. At his best on Jetlag, Milosh builds up his tracks in the simple interest of pulling them back to let the vocal take over. The first minute of “Hear in You” is a perfect example of this. The first minute of the song is pieced together from the Junior Boys/Apparat template of chilly electro-pop, but merely serves as walk-on music for the dramatic reveal of the track’s simple hook, on which Milosh stretches a syllable—the “ohhh” at the end of “know”—at just the right time, for just the right duration, and repeats it over and over. The effect is a specific kind of listening pleasure, of the late-90s/early 2000s post-Portishead/Massive Attack moment, when groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba boiled off trip-hop’s sense of danger, leaving it with a glut of sticky mood. When songs from that “chillout” moment of electro-R&B are done well—like Zero 7’s shimmering “Destiny,” say—they nail a perfect middleground between passion and propriety. “Hear in You” finds itself in that orbit, as does “Don’t Call It”, on which Milosh dips into his more gutsy lower register amidst what sounds like an adult-contempo remake of Radiohead’s Amnesiac.
The passion and yearning of “Destiny” was of a particular sort, Sia Furler opening the song by admitting to watching porn in her hotel dressing gown. This style of longing for human contact to counteract the cold, sterilized distance of travel is all over Jetlag, recalling another turn-of-the-century groove-based album: Thievery Corporation’s The Mirror Conspiracy, a cosmopolitan soundtrack for a specific kind of jetsetting rich guy—“Smooth Operator”s trust-funded step-son. Jetlag draws from this DNA, though Milosh evokes a starker, more purposefully mundane scenario: a design firm executive coldly shuffling a leatherbound portfolio through people movers in stark-white airports, and glassily staring into the near distance. It’s impossible for Milosh’s voice not to signify desire, and Jetlag is an album on which the glow of intimate passions arises from immaculate interior design.
