Mike Milosh

Mike Milosh’s 2004 debut was rife with smitten, electronically generated balladry. The Toronto native crafted You Make Me Feel around bubbling, understated beats and sunkissed R&B vocal melodies, singing the praises of a burgeoning love in his life. When the courtship disintegrated, he wrote Meme, a considerably bleaker diary entry that boasts song titles like “Falling Away,” “Run Away,” and “Couldn’t Sleep.” Because Milosh clings to the same restrained backdrops here that he did two years ago — preferring little more than beat pulses for his percussion and using warm, analog-sounding bass tones — not much has changed from You Make in Meme. However, Meme has some stirring moments that could only be the fruit of a soured love. In “I’m Trying,” a relatively simple synth melody is chopped and repeated continually over the tumbling roll beneath it while it’s countered by some electric piano and sporadic percussive snaps. As if perfectly in line with his recent shattering and timidity toward a new love (the subject at the center of “I’m Trying”), Milosh’s verse here is at first ghostly and muffled before it reluctantly registers in full-frontal view, when he has finally become confident and just comfortable enough to get his heart trampled all over again.