Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes- What Kinda Music

 
Tom Misch albums always sounded to me like a one long NPR Tiny Desk Concert, something relaxing you can play on your TV while eating dinner. I don’t want to be overly mean to the guy because he does have some strong tunes especially on his last full-length record Geography and that one-off single he did with Michael Kiwanuka is excellent. It’s just that none of those highlights make it over to this new album. One could assume a strong stylistic change and collaborating with another artist- Yussof Dayes, would make What Kinda Music more interesting but man is this thing tedious and boring. It’s uninteresting to the point of being annoying even as background music. Misches previous works had a charming and romantic quality to it, this album on the other hand almost completely lacks any emotion. Nightrider sounds like a really flat Timberlake rip-off, in his brief appearance Freddie Gibbs can’t really do much to salvage the track. Most songs here though sound like not very thought out studio jam sessions that could serve as background music on a YouTube video. Majority of them are just uninteresting but Lift Off stands out as being downright painful to listen to. Hearing something like this really makes you appreciate Thundercat even more.

Festival is hands down the best song on the album. It doesn’t sound much different than anything else on the record but there’s much more energy to it, the tune on the core of the track is really solid and the spacy, darker esthetic really works in this case. There’s a pretty obvious Radiohead influence on this track, the drumming on this track reminds me of Amnesiac especially. In general, drums are most consistently solid element of the album. If I’m talking positives, Storm Before the Calm is relatively entertaining, although the ending is pretty anti-climactic. I understand how it plays off the title of the song but it doesn’t make it less underwhelming. If I were to describe what kinda music What Kinda Music is, I would say it’s mostly slightly weirder elevator jazz. It really takes some talent to be so uninteresting for such a long time.

Rating: 3/10