You might be slow to warm to Tom Misch. You might look at his pretty, symmetrical face and listen to his pretty, sweet voice and think to yourself: Haven’t we seen this before? Do we really need another blue-eyed prince of soul? After all, Misch may sing Dilla’s praises now, but in five years, when Brexit finally goes through, there’s no telling how he’ll have changed. Maybe he’ll pull a “Man of the Derbyshire Woods”-type routine, adopt a rural accent, and take up fox hunting.
But Misch, who’s been releasing music through SoundCloud since 2011, is no British Timberlake (and he’s from South London, not Derbyshire). If you need an American analogue, think Mayer Hawthorne: Misch is another shy, beat-loving polymath raised in the temple of Dilla and Madlib who sidestepped to R&B once he realized that people enjoyed hearing his voice. (No falsetto though.) His debut album, Geography, the vast majority of which he produced himself, also carries echoes of Craig David and Jamie Woon. With its mild, coffee-house buzz and flat musical minimalism, the record is mostly in the tradition of contemporary British R&B, though a handful of instrumental tracks speak to the singer’s origin story as a lo-fi SoundCloud producer.
At their best, Hawthorne and David are strong songwriters, and Misch, who started singing over the past several years, is still working to acquire that skill. But the first proper song on Geography, “Lost in Paris,” is a gem that showcases the best of what he can do. It’s a simple song about the end of a relationship, but it refreshes itself constantly, with Misch bringing in a new element every eight bars or so. The final addition is a verse from the rapper GoldLink, who has been ubiquitous lately yet still hasn’t worn out his welcome. His comfort with Misch (the two have worked together previously) allows him to treat his verse as a punctuation mark, and it turns the song into an outright jam. It wouldn’t be surprising if “Lost in Paris” were to become the modest hit that introduces Misch to American ears.
That introduction will likely be frictionless, given the dreamy appeal of Misch’s voice (and looks) and the almost total lack of frisson in his music. Geography has little interest in sex, and he is finicky about other types of relationships as well. (The ballad “Man Like You” seems to hint at greater depth, but it’s a Patrick Watson cover.) It’s an overridingly pleasant listen, but that pleasantness is too often maintained by featureless production and other manifestations of Misch’s risk-averse instincts.
“Movie,” a ballad that opens with his sister Polly performing a classic film-inspired monologue, is a good example. It filters a past romance through the vocabulary of communications technology, with verses that recall love letters and texts and a chorus about vintage movies. (Oh and if you’re tempted to bring up “Lost in Paris,” which does seem romantically inclined, be warned: The relationship it explores is one between Misch and a lost hard drive.) Meanwhile Misch’s music, which is informed by the increasingly conservative online beat scene as well as his classical upbringing and jazz education, is often unadventurous, though his chops are obvious. His funkless, tediously faithful instrumental cover of “Isn’t She Lovely” spells the issue out clearly without using any words at all.
Misch shares some of the Luddite qualities that made backpackers of the last decade such a bore, but he doesn’t necessarily come off as boring—just timid, and there’s plenty of room for him to grow. In an interview last year, he said that his chief influences were John Mayer and Robert Glasper, and while the Mayer name-drop may be a worrisome sign to some, both of those artists had modest, crowd-pleasing debut albums before they became more technically adventurous. And like Misch himself, Geography is not as easy to write off as it initially appears. Songs including “Lost in Paris,” “Cos I Love You,” and the sparkling “Disco Yes” are stickier than you’d expect, and Misch’s expertise with jazz guitar offsets his modest arrangements. He said while making the album that he felt “like I’m still at the stage where I have to kind of prove before I can just make what I really want to make.” But if the best songs here are indicators of the kind of fun, bubbly music he really wants to make, he could do with less proving and more letting letting loose.
