It’s been a long and winding road for Dave Melillo. Melillo’s debut EP, Talk Is Cheap, was in many ways the archetype for an onslaught of cute, safe teenage boys with guitars, from Never Shout Never’s Christofer Drew Ingle all the way down to flavor-of-next-month Plug In Stereo’s Trevor Dahl. A softer and more youthfully innocent take on the Dashboard Confessional formula, it seemed like a promising beginning to a career, but as with virtually everyone signed to Drive Thru at the time, things went off the rails in dramatic fashion. Contractually locked up from recording his own material, Melillo picked up a bass guitar and bounced to emo-popsters Cute Is What We Aim For (whose name now seems to follow Melillo in parentheses wherever he goes); when Cute imploded, he picked up the pieces and forged Nocturnal Me, which began as an edgy alt-rock outfit but has slowly morphed into an outlet for Melillo’s R&B experiments. Now, after five years, Melillo’s finally released new material under his own name, the free mixtape Thinking Of You. 

But while Thinking Of You carries the official Melillo imprimatur, only a few tracks – the lugubrious “All2U”; album opener “Role Player” – rehash the boy-with-acoustic-guitar formula that made the name notable. More often, there are subtle tweaks. “Blood” loops that guitar over the top of a perfectly seductive bass riff; “Better Man” pairs coffee shop strumming with a pulsing bottom end that gently nudges the track forward. But really, the dominant mood here is smooth R&B. (Melillo has made no bones about his love for Trey Songz, and it shows all over Thinking Of You.) “Future Focused” wouldn’t feel out of place on a mix with Drake and The Weeknd; “Last Love Song” fully commits, doing away with the acoustic instrumentation entirely. For Melillo, the two genres seem like two sides of a coin, and they make for a clean meld, almost too clean. 

Considering how divergent those two genres could be, it’s a tad disappointing that Melillo, who’s gathered a bit of a reputation for his flights of fancy—this is, after all, the guy who once announced he was changing his name to D. Blaaq and started dropping radio-ready urban jams in collaboration with Stockz The Rapper—isn’t taking more chances here. There’s a disconcertingly earnest acoustic take on Green Day’s “Chump,” and “I Wonder If We Can Just Be Friends” veers dangerously close to Stevie Wonder at his late-70s schmaltz-pop worst (we were half-expecting a Debby Boone cameo by the end). But outside of those, there’s really not much of the sense of daring that hallmarks the best mixtapes – no skits, no adventures in sampling-gone-wild, no genre-benders. It’s all very milquetoast (and virtually all lazily midtempo); wedding acoustic folk to urban steez feels innovative in concept, but Melillo plays it the same way time after time. Not that his way doesn’t work, and work well, but there’s a bit of a sense of missed opportunity here.

But if it’s a little odd that Melillo chose the mixtape format for his most conventional release since 2006, maybe that’s because he’s finally found his comfort zone here. And if comfort is a little dull at times, well at least Melillo’s earned the right to settle in. Thinking Of You isn’t Melillo’s strongest work – it would be twice as great at half the length – but for fans who have stuck it out since the beginning, it’s close enough to a return to form that it should sit well. If nothing else, it’s nice to hear Dave Melillo sound, for the first time in a while, comfortable in his own skin.

★★★☆☆

This review was composed by Jesse Richman