Today we kick off our yearly BBC Sound of 20XX roundup, with a man favored by the Jukebox’s favorite artist…

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[5.45]Brad Shoup: Got the car working again, and my commutes are spent toggling between KKMJ and KVET. The contrast between smooth R&B and alt-rock can give me the bends, and I’ve coped by keeping it mostly on the R&B tip. The promises are similar. Still, there’s something about folks singing their age. Sampha’s in his mid-twenties, but when your arrangement is you and a piano there’s no time to be twerpy. He skirts falsetto, but even then it’s of a grown kind. The issue’s with the text: the combination of not-thinking and taking it slow, the misjudged cleverness of the “too much”/”new lust” rhyme. If he’d just centered on him and his lover, laying opposite, constantly halting, there’d be magic there. But it’s easy to break such a spell by invoking lust.
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Alfred Soto: With a hook so deep that it calls for skepticism if not rejection, “Too Much” relies on Sampha’s epicene voice more than required. Personally, I have trouble when anyone cautions me not to think too much — even “it.”
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Anthony Easton: This is overwhelmed, sad, kind of drugged up, a perfect midwinter wallow, and almost ideal for reminding you of the excess of good will that will fail three weeks post-New Years.
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David Lee: Back when I was ten years old and taking piano lessons, my teacher gave me a musical notebook to jot down any compositions I made up. The few I wrote traversed the same territory as this song — hideously over the top melodrama, all heavy-handed chords and overdone arpeggios whirling in syrupy pedal abuse. A child’s grasp on what constitutes catharsis: cartoonish self-seriousness. And yet, all the same, Sampha accurately renders the way emotions can, and do, swallow their subjects whole. “Too Much” is the sound of not thinking about that thing but then thinking about that thing anyways. It’s the flip side of The Weeknd’s late-night, drugged-up bleariness — the panicky obsessive who perceives the internal with terrifying clarity. Sometimes it’s impossible to see life as anything other than an oversaturated soap opera.
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Jer Fairall: As the backbone of the best piece of music Drake had anything to do with in 2013, “Too Much” was gorgeous and even redemptive; for four minutes, it was nearly possible to buy into his increasingly exasperating and uncomfortably simpering plaints. On its own, “Too Much” is no less aching and pretty, but malnourished and insubstantial in the James Blake mode of fragile minimalism as a code for “sensitivity.” The first twenty seconds, however, suggest the tremendous potential of an instrumental piano-only version.
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Patrick St. Michel: The true triumph of this song is how much it makes me miss Drake. When Toronto’s finest debuted this on Jimmy Fallon, the part that stood out was Sampha’s hook. Drake sounded perfectly fine… but how could he compete with that skeletal piano and that put-your-head-on-my-shoulders singing? Alas, the Sampha-only version seems to just be killing time after the now-familiar chorus, Sampha coming off like he’s just showing off his vocal range more than taking this anywhere new. Turns out Drake added an urgency to “Too Much,” one of piling-up pressure that made the sweetness of the hook hit all the harder.
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Crystal Leww: Sampha’s raw voice is deeply affecting, and yet, his best work has been more processed, more refined. Say what you will about Drake, but “Too Much” worked better as a hook and a bridge sandwiched between lines of stream of consciousness. He’ll continue to make music; I just hope he finds the right producers rather than this singer-songwriter piano thing.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Seemingly excised from Drake’s album-only family riposte of the same name, “Too Much” puts Sampha’s unusual voice up front and centre with only the barest of accompaniment — no lightly bruising SBTRKT beats, no 40 aether to sink into with melisma. And against a piano, that judder of a voice still seems to exist outside of its surroundings, achieving the unusual feat of becoming alluring whilst being totally grating. Momentary liaisons with druggy beauty rub up against the sound of someone scrambling to be heard over a loud pub — there’s grace and gratuity, the grovelling and the grating, moments that make you understand why he’s been called smooth as brûlée and others that make you understand why he’s been called an amphibian Tracy Chapman. He’s an original, at least. This song confuses me more than anything, but I’m actually excited at the prospect of struggling with this guy in 2014.
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Edward Okulicz: He’s got a terrific voice, with an only halfway good showcase for it. The verses and lilting piano are pretty and affecting, comfortingly bland rather than boringly bland. The rest is an impressive vocal feat to no particular end and a bit of a slog to actually listen to. In days gone by someone would have made him refine the song until it was ready or tell him that getting the good bit on someone else’s track was the best of all worlds.
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Katherine St Asaph: One of the few good decisions fucking Drake made in 2013: cutting Sampha off while he still sounded heartfelt, not drunk on his own emo. Sure I can relate — but I’m not releasing the reason why as a single.
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Jonathan Bradley: Needs more Drake.
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