It’s no surprise that Tobias Jesso Jr’s debut album, Goon, sounds like the work of someone who lives in a permanent state of heartbreak. A delve into his backstory reveals that the album was written at a time when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, a relationship broke down, his Visa expired and he entered the dangerous rock star age of 27.
Jesso has been lumped in with the likes of Father John Misty and Matthew E White, but his songs are far more straightforward than that. He quipped to Rolling Stone that he wanted to be a “bad-voiced version of Adele. But a guy,” and he wasn’t far off. Tonight the songs that get the most rousing response (such as How Could You Babe, with its accusatory lyrics, “I find out you’d gone and met a new man / And told him he’s the love of your life / How could you babe?”) luxuriate in their universality and directness. One audience member sticks his lighter up in the air, another wipes a tear from her eye and a section of the crowd sing along as if they’re on the terraces.
Taken over a whole set, however, his songs lack dynamism and can lapse into cloying self-pity. On chirpily strummed The Wait, for example, he’s less Adele and more Michael Cera playing a substitute teacher in a Wes Anderson film. His faux-naive act is even less convincing on his cover of Georgia on My Mind, which highlights the seismic gap between his reedy rendition and Ray Charles’s take. Much better are songs such as True Love and Hollywood, which trade heart-on-sleeve missives for complex character observations, where loneliness is not a free pass to being lovable, but becomes cyclical and desperate. Jesso’s future may be in his bigger, poppier moments, but he’s more interesting when he plays around the darker end of the spectrum.
