My Mess, My Heart, My Life, by Myles Smith
Myles Smith is opening for fellow UK pop artiste Ed Sheeran at quite a few North American arena shows (including a Summerfest date), and that feels right: Smith’s first proper long player, My Mess, My Heart, My Life, yearns to reach from the front row to the nosebleed seats.
Gathering three tracks from two earlier EPs and retaining Peter Fenn, a co-writer and co-producer from those EPs, My Mess is musically unmessy: the blend of pop, folk, and soul smoothly passes from ear canal to brain without a single dissonant feeling or note.
Inside the smoothness, Smith is a solid singer with considerable melodic range and an unshowy falsetto, although when he murmurs, he tends toward the pouty phrasing that perhaps too many other pop singers, including Selena Gomez and former One Direction member Niall Horan, slip into when they think they’re being softly earnest.
Horan joins Smith, and neither of them murmurs too much, on “Drive Safe,” an especially catchy and anthem-minded track that heavily echoes the big-room positivity of pop-folk and folk-pop contemporaries like the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons.
Two of Smith’s best songs in that style come one after another here: the carefully processed slow rhythm behind “Grandma’s Place,” in which the pouty phrasing enhances childhood details, leads into the sway of “Mary’s Song,” in which mellowness is Smith’s way of describing how Mary copes, via love and smiles and music, with a difficult life.
Much less good is “Dublin Lights,” an attempt at overt and chanted cheer that has more, uncomfortably, in common with Swedish group Rednex’s 1994 hit “Cotton Eye Joe” than with anything upbeat from the Chieftains.
The mismatch of clear talent and muddled stylistic objectives seems to be the mess of My Mess, My Heart, My Life. When Myles Smith leans more toward heart and life, his potential becomes more actual.
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