London’s Tom Minor doesn’t just wear his chaos on his sleeve, he’s sewn it into every stitch of ‘The Manic Phase’, a four-song EP that careens through jagged moods and restless identity with a punk poet’s grin and a soul singer’s pulse. If you’ve ever found yourself laughing mid-meltdown or dancing through the wreckage of last night’s regrets, this one’s for you.
The title-track is the EP’s centre of gravity, and its centrifuge. The verses bounce between kitchen-sink surrealism and razor-sharp lines that stick to your ribs (“recreational use of lithium and lukewarm water” is equal parts tragic and hilarious). It’s unhinged but controlled in the way a tightrope walker still winks on their way down. There’s a manic glee in the delivery, something that recalls ‘White Album’-era John Lennon crashing into ‘This Year’s Model’-era Elvis Costello, but funnier, scrappier, and distinctly Minor.
Throughout the EP, Tom Minor trades in contradiction. ‘Saturday Eats The Young’ is both a street-level elegy and a wink at the weekend’s worst instincts, while ‘Future Is An F Word’ leans into a collapsing tomorrow with the swagger of someone who’s already found the emergency exit and lit a smoke. Even when things go cosmic, like on ‘Expanding Universe’, the boots stay on the ground, stomping through the cracks in the pavement where idealism used to live.
There’s nothing clean or careful about ‘The Manic Phase’, and that’s its brilliance. Minor and producer Teaboy Palmer (still clearly enjoying his role as the “Phil Spector of Finchley Road”) let the recordings breathe and bleed. The arrangements are wiry, the choruses uncontainable, and the energy jumps the red line more than once.
Tom Minor is throwing a party in the eye of the storm, and you’re all invited. ‘The Manic Phase’ grabs your hand, tosses you into Soho at 3 a.m., and says: “Try keeping up”.
