Review Summary: Organs is a timeless masterpiece from the early days of Youtube bedroom musicians, and its musings follow me everywhere I go in life. There is no record on earth quite like it.
History has mostly forgotten about ex-youtuber, singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and composer Tom Milsom. Only on the oldest recesses of Youtube will you catch a glimpse of his blue hair, coy demeanour and progressive modal mixture. Readers can drawn their own conclusions about Tom as a person, but I write this review today nearly seven years too late to dispel preconceptions if one's already learned in the Youtube abuse scandals of the early 2010s. Regardless, the desire to write some kind of review of this record has sat with me for many, many years and today I put this wish into words.
Organs is a focussed record. It is an expansive record, with a clear mood and a signature sound that fills its every crevice. Milsom makes psychedelic lo-fi electric ukulele pop - there are no electric guitar parts on this album, and instead the songs are driven down the centre by either deft, liquid-like piano that happily spills over the edges of the song and fizzes on your hand, or a now-trademark solid body electric ukulele, strung up righty but played upside down by the left-handed Milsom.
All the instruments on this record, in fact, are performed by Milsom, and his instrumental prowess is not to be sniffed at - from the pumping drums on the pining opening track “Body” to the sampled kitchen sink in “Having Fun”, right to the thin latin-ish beats surrounded by mandolins on Holes, there’s no question to the technical ability of the artist here. Even the kitschy, out-of-tune ocarinas and recorders fit into the sound of the record, with Milsom’s soft tenor-baritone sitting right in the middle on most tracks.
Milsom doesn’t sound like a professional pop singer or even a folk singer, really. His understated timbre and inflection vocally sings of an older age of the Internet, an age just after the widespread access to video-streaming broadband but before cheap HD cameras and modern DAWs. You can hear the DIY attitude of a lot of old internet content creators in this music, along with the problem-solving of an artist trying to make a big sound with the budget of an early Youtube-monetized video channel. The record sounds cheaply recorded, but not cheaply written or thoughtlessly arranged. In a way this is the true representation of what a ‘bedroom artist’ should sound like - twisting the limitations of their recording environment into strong, signature trademarks to one’s sound, with songwriting and instrumental chops at the forefront. Good god, I haven’t even really talked about the music itself yet.
The album opens with a very intent thesis statement on “Body”, where Milsom’s voice is delayed and reverbed over the sound of a thin and sparse sounding electric ukulele. Bass and drums swirl in along with an assortment of delightfully charming electric organs and synthesisers - the kind of cheap old keyboards you might find in an op shop, or in your grandparent’s living room gathering dust. The lyric sets up a tone somewhere in-between quiet rumination and abject despair, talking about body dysphoria in a strained, repetitive refrain that bounces from ear to ear. “My body fights it in my sleep -it doesn’t seem to be the same as yours” Milsom sings, “Less desirable, like a schoolboy’s embarrassment.”
The hopelessness is catalysed on the second track “Alone”, which opens with a disorientating synth arpeggio that is layered with delay, swirling around your head until a stark, distorted drum machine crystallises the rhythmic uncertainty into a deliberate, yet shaky groove. Milsom sings of a girl that he met once upon a time, and details the horrible isolation felt within the relationship. When you think you’ve got an understanding of the situation, he skips forward in time, in a strange catalogue of the actual writing process of Organs itself - “It’s two years later now, the album’s nearly done”.
Tracks three and four, “Take Me Out” and “Having Fun” both feature lush, gorgeous soundscapes in different ways. “Take Me Out” continues the idea of distorted drum machines, and the heavily processed kit jerks back and forward through a slurry of layered backing vocals as a crisp lead vocal, overdriven and stark as Milsom sings of summer sun and warmth with all the air of a winter that won’t end. The two atmospheres push against each other and culminate in a breakdown with solo drums and voice, stuttering and stumbling as Milsom proclaims that “You’ve got it, and I want it. This is what we can’t be without… Dark scheming and light dreaming. This is what it’s all about.”, before launching into a final, triumphant-yet-resigned wash of synths, bass, vocals and a secondhand omnichord (look it up.)
The wash continues - Having Fun opens with a tambourine and snare hit that leads into a groove of auxiliary percussion, bass guitar and ocarina. Again, the cheap but effortlessly employed synths fill out the back end, with swirling, chanting voices and sounds that are nearly completely unrecognisable (a melodica with all its keys mashed makes an appearance sounding more like an orchestral percussion ratchet than an aerophone) and the cacophony abruptly drops to, again, percussion and voice, this time the drums are Milsom’s kitchen sink, upturned glasses and pots full of water, pitched samples of a cork leaving a bottle and the same insistent bass riff. It sets up for the massive, almost impenetrable wash of sound that is Better/Going Out Again, where the reverb is cranked to maximum and the half-time drums from Take Me Out make a reappearance. The lyrics also drop their obtuseness here in an interesting change of pace, as Milsom’s dark rumination gives way to unfettered anguish - “I want to be everybody’s friend all of the time” he proclaims, “And I fear one day it will kill me.” Maybe it will, Tom. Who’s to say?
On to side B, and “Pipes” draws from a variety of influences - They Might Be Giants, Deerhoof, and even a little Maroon 5 to create a thumping, grooving piece of cryptic electric-ukulele pop with tinny, rolling drums and a lyric about android maintenance as placeholder for self-care. “MULTIVAC is everyone, and everyone’s a circle in the ground.” This song is perhaps the least reverb-soaked of the record and thus the one that most reminds me of Milsom’s original profession as an early adopter of the Youtube platform for their music.
“Beautiful” and “Dreams” continue the cryptic themes introduced on Pipes, with the former beginning as a sprightly piano lick with a quickly-sung vocal that dances on the top of what sounds to be Milsom’s digital piano plugged straight into his computer, complete with signal noise and sparkly sustain. The lyrical delivery really is frantic here. In the span of four measures, Milsom predicts that “One day I’ll kill, and my fur at the crime scene will be all they need to torment and despise me, and they’ll say my crime is that I’m not a primate - But I will drag my knuckles in defence until the day that I die.” It is more rap than song here, but the density of information feels appropriate, particularly as the track fades directly into “Dreams”, a tune driven by an organ bass and baritone ukuleles being plucked in harmony. Ethereal vocals swirl above, murmuring something about “celluloid streamers.”
The last four tracks on Organs are sad, nostalgic, impenetrable and depressing. This does not stop them from being musically fascinating or gripping. “Chemical Reactions” might just be the saddest breakup song of the last decade. Fingerpicked electric ukulele provides a folky interlude from the crashing drums and soundscapes that fill the surrounding tracks, allowing a quick breath of air before the lyrics drag you back down into the melancholy and darkness, and this time it’s final. Across the whole record, one gets the sense that there is a finality to all this, as if it is a goodbye letter written to a person you used to love, or maybe a person you used to be. “Weird Times” talks about this thing exactly - a waltz where Tom talks about “Taking a walk in the garden that’s frozen in time overnight”. The sparkling, fizzing organs show you the image in the lyrics. You can see it right there, in-between the phased drums and slowly rotating bass.
Then for the finale, two tracks - “Holes” and “Fine” retro-actively colour what this record means by providing a distinct end. Holes is a limping half-samba that borrows “Alone”’s time-skip technique, talking about marking oneself in the fervour of a deity and re-discovering your feelings of a time long past one day in the shower, decades after you’d forgotten what it felt like. The answer to the silent question of whether this album decides to reassure or sadden the listener at its close is provided in “Fine”, a tune that ostensibly does both, without quite giving way to one over the other. Solo piano and voice passes through all manner of strange, nonfunctional chords that stretch and contract as Milsom sings.
The last line sung on this record is “You’ll be fine”, an apparently uncomplicated sentiment that is coloured and given context by the musical setting in which it’s placed. Will I really be fine? As Tom Milsom’s “Organs” comes to a close, I realise I know the answer little more than I did in the first track. And that is its power - to take one on a journey, nay, an odyssey through the mind of a single downhearted musician somewhere unreachable on the internet, where every thought and feeling is laid bare to see and digest but still somehow keeping the cards close to the chest, nudging the final sentiment just out of view, where only one’s imagination can fill in the missing spot. It is a masterclass in expression of sadness, a nervous window into one’s own guilt, and a ***ing excellent album of indie music.
Organs is, in my humble opinion, probably the best record that came out in 2013 and additionally, is vying for the "best record of the decade spot" in my personal rankings. It stays with me for weeks after a listen and consistently pops back up in my regular rotation every few months, if not years. Its words have only grown more pertinent with time and its music is timeless. If you listen to one record about being sad this year, make it Organs. You’ll be sad.
