Album Review: Full Circle by Tom Misch
The south London guitarist’s first solo album in eight years bets everything on the song instead of the loop. It pays off more often than it doesn’t.
Geography was bedroom-produced, sample-heavy, J Dilla’s ghost in every drum chop, features from De La Soul and GoldLink (before he was on that bullshit) and Loyle Carner filling out the rooms Tom Misch built on a laptop. Full Circle has one guest. Misch wrote these songs on piano and guitar first, then brought them to Nashville, where Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian helped develop them with a live band and tape machines and a vintage Neumann U47 microphone. The north star he cites is the kind of 1970s singer-songwriter LP your parents owned on vinyl. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, John Martyn, JJ Cale. The leap is steep. On “Old Man,” Misch sings about noticing grey hairs and seeing his father’s face in the mirror, imagining a great-great-great-grandson catching flights long after he’s gone. The melody is spare and the lyric is plain, and neither of those things are weaknesses. There’s nothing between you and what he’s saying. “This dressing room is all I know,” he admits in the second verse, and the line carries the resignation of someone taking stock of the only life he’s had.
Misch is the youngest of three siblings, and “Sisters with Me” is the most personal and direct thing he’s ever written. He put it together while living with his sisters in the family home for the first time as adults. The lyric is a catalog of closeness:
“Cut from the same threads
Pinks, greens, and reds
No falling behind
No running ahead.”
His sister Laura is herself a working musician, a saxophonist and composer with her own records, and that gives the song a weight he never mentions in the lyric. He doesn’t need to. “When the tears are rolling down my face/And when I’m lost and tryna find my way/I know that I will be okay” is the kind of line that sounds like a greeting card until you realize how few songwriters can deliver it without a wink or a hedge.
The love songs scatter in different directions. “Red Moon” asks a celestial body to intervene with a woman whose heart he can’t reach on his own, and the pleading has a formality to it, an old-fashioned quality, a man on his knees talking to the sky. “Slow Tonight” is the opposite. It opens on a Friday night, sirens and flashing lights, then snaps domestic:
“You say, ‘I don’t like your friends that much’
Well, I love them all if it’s once a month
When we’re alone, I just can’t get enough
It may be unhealthy, I don’t give a fuck.”
That’s the loosest, funniest moment on the album, and it’s also the most uptempo. “Goldie” drops the humor completely. Someone pulled him out of a terrible place, and he can barely articulate the gratitude beyond naming it. “I started to think that you didn’t exist/Who the hell do I thank for this” is the closest Misch gets to overwhelmed on the whole record, and his voice stays level through it.
Misch spent a portion of his hiatus working as a barista in Cornwall, another stretch driving a campervan solo through Portugal, and a while after that gardening in southeast London. He left a career that had put him on stages at Brixton Academy and Terminal 5 and festivals across continents—and he did it because the career was making him sick. The details he shared publicly were plain and undramatic. He enrolled in a surfing school. He moved back in with his family. His Instagram statement about stepping away read the way a person talks when they’ve already made the decision and don’t need anyone to weigh in.
Fear runs through the second half of Full Circle just as plainly as any of that. “Running Away” catalogs a walk through a city, lovers on a park bench drinking wine, buildings climbing high, children lined up outside a museum, and then confesses that all of it terrifies him. “Echo from the Flames” is bleaker, face down in ashes, reaching up, nobody there. “Fear Can’t Hurt Any More Than a Dream” is the most unusual of the three, listing rattlesnakes, tidal waves, and plane crashes before concluding that none of them can hurt you if you’re dreaming. It’s a strange, circling song, almost nursery-rhyme-like in its insistence on its own title, and it’s the one moment on the record where Misch sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of something instead of stating a belief.
“Sultan of Silence” closes the album’s emotional argument without closing it. The song paints a figure who never speaks “(He walks where echoes die/He knows the weight of every stone”). A father, a mentor, a version of himself he hasn’t become yet. It doesn’t explain. “Days of Us,” with Kaidi Akinnibi’s saxophone weaving through a two-voice conversation about distance, is the only collaborative one, and it earns its placement because two people are genuinely talking past each other. “Can’t you stay?/Let’s meet halfway,” says one voice. “Despite the rain,/Can’t we try?” says the other. They want the same thing and can’t agree on how to get there. Misch recorded the saxophone part back at Unwound Studios in Deptford, when Akinnibi dropped by and started playing. That looseness, someone walking in, and the tape rolling, is Full Circle in miniature. The record bets that a song written on guitar and sung in a clear, unadorned voice can carry the weight of a person’s worst years, and the bet is a good one.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Sisters with Me,” “Old Man,” “Goldie”