Tobias Jesso Jr: Goon review – wilfully retro songs in the prevailing 70s style

As a musical example of how first impressions can be misleading, Tobias Jesso Jr takes some beating. When he first came to notice, after posting a song called Just a Dream on YouTube, accompanied by a photo of its composer seated at a piano as a child, the most immediately appropriate comparison seemed to be with Daniel Johnston, the mentally ill singer-songwriter famously beloved of Kurt Cobain. Like the music that made Johnston famous, Just a Dream was a beautiful, fragile piano ballad, its lyrics filled with intimations of imminent apocalypse – “I had a bad dream that the world would end and would be forever ending” – and of romantic despair expressed in a curiously skewed, childlike way: “I never had nobody else, no bestest friend until the end.” Moreover, as on the tapes Johnston made in his parents’ basement, Just a Dream was so lo-fi that the piano kept warping out of tune, as if the tape it was recorded on had stretched. Here, it seemed, was another in a long line of talented outsider artists, destined for cult stardom.

How wrong can you be? For all his talent, Daniel Johnston was the stuff of record company nightmares: bipolar and schizophrenic, he fired his manager because he decided he was in league with Satan and was once committed to a mental institution after wresting control of a plane in the belief that he’d been possessed by the spirit of Casper the Friendly Ghost. And, as it turns out, Tobias Jesso Jr is very much the kind of artist record companies dream about: a “tall drink of water”, as an admiring Rolling Stone profile put it, who’s quickly attracted not cult attention but plaudits from Adele and Taylor Swift. He arrives with a tragic backstory: he taught himself to play piano and wrote the songs on his debut album while staying at his parents’ home in Vancouver, recuperating from a car accident and a failed relationship and nursing his mother through her recovery from cancer. It’s clearly uncontrived and must have been horrible to live through, but, without wishing to sound hideously cynical, it’s the kind of saga that never harms the appeal of a sensitive singer-songwriter given to writing songs called things such as How Could You Babe and Can We Still Be Friends. “They all feel sorry for him, especially the girls,” as one James Taylor fan put it in 1970, when asked about his idol’s success.

Furthermore, the lo-fi sound of Just a Dream was a red herring. On Goon, a succession of producers – including Ariel Rechtshaid, Patrick Carney of the Black Keys and Jesso’s chief collaborator, former Girls bassist Chet “JR” White – have smoothed the fragility and murk of Jesso’s demos into a 70s-inspired production that accentuates the similarities between his songs and those of various vintage songwriters. Without You and Bad Words recall mid-70s John Lennon. There’s something distinctly Randy Newmanish about How Could You Babe and the vaudevillian, self-mocking Crocodile Tears. Can We Still Be Friends and The Wait are so in thrall to Wings-era Paul McCartney that they borrow not just his style of melody and phrasing, but his winsome lyrical bent: a bold move, given that his winsome lyrical bent was the main thing about Paul McCartney that got on people’s tits 40 years ago. It’s still a bit insufferable. “Could I ask you on a date? We’ve never kissed before so it might be strange,” coos Jesso, rather inviting the reaction: oh, for God’s sake, mate, you’re 29 years old. Do us all a favour and grow a pair.

Jesso’s album arrives in a season that has also brought us Father John Misty’s Elton John-aping I Love You, Honeybear, Ryley Walker’s highly praised, Tim Buckley-indebted Primrose Green and the second album by Matthew E White; there are certainly moments during Goon when you start to wonder if it might not be nice to hear something by an acclaimed American singer-songwriter that sounds like it was recorded in 2015, rather than 1974. Equally, however, there are moments when the sheer loveliness of Jesso’s melodies transcends the wilfully retro atmosphere, or where his songwriting lives up to the artists he’s indebted to: what’s great about Without You isn’t the fact that it sounds like John Lennon, but that it’s a song you suspect Lennon would have been happy to come up with.

Jesso is audibly still in the process of finding his own voice, but for all the naivety on display – a more experienced writer might have taken greater pains to ensure that opener Can’t Stop Thinking About You didn’t keep threatening to turn into the theme tune from Cheers – there are flashes of striking confidence. Recorded so that it sounds like Jesso is performing in an empty venue, Hollywood is a gritty retelling of the disasters that befell him before returning to his parents’ home, while the similarly themed Leaving LA sees him taking a decisive step out of the shadow of his influences: slipping from piano ballad to an odd, synth-led warping of the Beach Boys’ mid-60s sound and back again. He sounds like an artist with a future more interesting than his obsession with the past.