Tom Goss: ‘Remember What It Feels Like’ Review

metroweekly.com:

Remember What It Feels Like (★★★★☆) is mostly upbeat pop, with the occasional heartfelt ballad thrown in for good measure. It’s a fundamentally lighthearted album, frontloaded with largely acoustically-driven tracks, some of which are playful and others lightly plaintive.

Almost all are seemingly tailor-made to make a listener grin from ear to ear.If the first few tracks are where Goss grounds himself and tells his own story, the latter half of the album is where he seems to be having the most fun.

Synths and elements of rock and a bit of vocoder creep into tracks like “Undercover Summer” and the pop-rock throwback “Break Your Heart,” which promises hell in a tongue-in-cheek way to a prospective lover if he is ever wronged.As much as he goes out of his way to keep things light, Goss can’t help but find himself in a reflective mood this time around, and several of the tracks reflect on where he’s been and where he is now.He is starry-eyed on “Everything” as he expresses his wonder and amazement at having found love.

He is also very capable of turning his gaze inward, as he does on “Enemy of Good,” which ruminates on perfectionism and the ways it tends to sabotage creativity, productivity, and simple human joy.As far as he has come, though, he does not lose sight of the fact that there’s a lot of life to be lived still, and a wide-eyed optimism suffuses tracks like “First Date,” which almost perfectly captures the innocent joy and trepidation of a budding would-be relationship.