Tom Misch - Geography

  by Dave Goodwin

published: 31 / 5 / 2018

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Tom Misch started sonic life uploading roughly three tracks a week from his bedroom in South London to Soundcloud at sixteen. He admits he never set out with any masterplan when he began making music, but since then he has built up a considerable fan base and rapidly become one of the U.K.’s most exciting emerging new artists, gaining no less than 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify and playing a sold-out tour of the U.K., U.S. and Europe in 2016. Not only that but along the way he has befriended and worked with artists like Novelist, Loyle Carner, and Zak Abel, and he’s accumulated a total of 75 million streams across all platforms to date. Misch sang in a choir at school, and at the tender age of just four picked up the violin. He has a very artistic family. His father is a passionate violinist and his older sisters all played guitar as did Misch after he taught himself to play Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Nirvana songs. Today, he also plays bass, banjo and keyboards. A fifteen year old Misch was introduced to the music of J Dilla and enjoyed it so much he joined Music Technology at school the following year, and started to mess around with 90’s hip-hop on Logic Pro etc. His first piece of music was a collaboration with his sister Laura, on the jazz-inflected ‘Follow’, and soon afterwards he started to make obscure jazz samples, guitar, and vocals to create the ‘The Journey’. Along the way he has collaborated with soulful singers Carmody and Jordan Rakei, and he has also struck up a relationship with fellow South Londoner Loyle Carner. Misch has lived in South London all his life and his biggest influence to his sound has always been jazz. Having a degree in jazz guitar, Misch is an avid listener of Robert Glasper, Roy Hargrove, Cory Henry and jazz-influenced songwriters like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu. ‘Geography ‘is Misch's debut album which weaves its magic about you in a warm fog of disco, R&B and 80's house. It smarts of all those things and has me reminiscing of 80’s disco times - think Inner City, Womack and Womack and Odyssey and all those warm thumping disco beats but it also drifts a little later into De La Soul too. Speaking of which, they make an entrance half way in with a brilliant track. 'It Runs Through Me'. Loyle Carner, shows up too later on with 'Water Baby', which is a wonderful hip- hop track at the end of the album. At the start 'Before Paris' has a long sample intro telling us to love music and then develops into a wicked jazzy trip, while the second track 'South of the River' is a Phil Fearon/Galaxy style mid-paced dancer. This great first offering is filled with moments like this, and if you can't dance to this then you must be dead from the neck down. There are more laidback moments here too such as ‘Man Like You' and 'Movie', the latter of which for some reason reminds me of a soul-fuelled Prefab Sprout. This is an impressive debut album, one that will be on the sound system for some time and will get better with age, and which with a bit of luck will propel Tom Misch to greater heights. Marvellous!

Track Listing:-

1 Before Paris
2 Lost in Paris
3 South of the River
4 Movie
5 Tick Tock
6 It Runs Through Me
7 Isn't She Lovely
8 Disco Yes
9 Man Like You
10 Water Baby
11 You're On My Mind
12 Cos I Love You
13 We've Come So Far

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/tommisch123/

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