#gamt

[metabolismmusic]

Tom Misch’s Geography is a masterpiece of reflective chill beats and soulful musicality. This album is a lover and a friend; it has a heart and a spirit. Geography became the soundtrack to the feeling of falling in love. It’s something mysterious, reflective, and internal. But it’s also something dynamic, driving, and addictive. It is a perfect combination of uniqueness and relatability, of rhythms and melodies to cause you to leave it on “Loop Album” for hours, maybe even days. We crave its groove and taste the longing of Misch’s masterpiece. Is it funk/jazz/R&B/nu-disco/rap/indie/alternative? Does it matter? All that matters is finding a way back, so we can feel and reflect once more with Geography.

The day I discovered Tom Misch changed my life. A good friend mine, a dancer, sent me “Watch Me Dance” off of Misch’s 2016 Reverie EP. It was a suggestion for a concept video dedicated to our own dance community; a family we had chosen in life. Misch’s overall library had only consisted of EP’s and features at the time. April 2018, Misch’s first studio album, Geography, was released.

I was one month from moving from Boston to San Francisco, CA; the biggest move I’d made to date. Three albums were being looped through my life for that last month: Born and Raised by John Mayer, After Laughter by Paramore, and Geography by Tom Misch.

When Geography was released, my partner, who had already been living in San Francisco for the last three months, and I were both obsessed. Our musical taste intersected often and this was a perfect match. While listening to the album, I would think of him and know that he could be listening to the same notes and beats. I guess it became the 21st-century version of looking up at the moon and thinking of your distant lover, feeling comforted and less far from them because they’re looking at the same moon as you. Our moon was Geography.

[metabolismmusic]

Green Day, more than any other band I had grown up with, made me feel at my coolest. And at 10, nothing was more important. I remember when I first heard “American Idiot”. It was like nothing else I’d heard before. It was quite literally the most punk rock thing I’d ever heard in my life. “American Idiot” made a kid feel like somebody; I was born to rebel. Alas, I became more well-behaved than my punkish alter-ego would like to admit. The year Green Day released their next album, 21st Century Breakdown, my punk rock self was sparked once more and I immediately began familiarizing myself with their entire library (from what my local library had to offer.) I remember purchasing 21st Century Breakdown on iTunes when it came out, which was a big deal for any kid to spend their well-saved iTunes money on.

But it was “American Idiot” that brought me to love the album itself. American Idiot didn’t have a single dud track. Every second, every note and beat was perfection. It is a true fantasy. This was the millennial teen’s fairy tale story: an oppressed, lonely, and relatable protagonist is driven mad by his environment. Eventually, he falls in and out of love. Our anti-hero becomes the very thing he tried to avoid, a product of his environment and internal emotions. It’s a tale of angst, dread, soul, truth, love. Each track a chapter in the story of our own wildest, darkest fantasies.

This was a coming of age period. You were discovering things about yourself and your inner psyche you had never known existed. And yet, there it was, lying in the journey of American Idiot. It was a thread connecting the ones who felt the way you did. It connected the sad, confused, independent, honest kids who lived in the same reality together. This was an album that rocked. Anthem after anthem grabbed our hearts the same as on the cover, waiting to pull the pin and explode into something. These are the kids that live in the dream between nostalgia and the future. Our generation didn’t need singles and hits. We needed an album. We needed American Idiot.