Alex G - Beach Music
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Alex G
Beach Music
Rating:
“Part of what he became didn’t fancy it up on land, and went back down there, and turned into porpoises and sharks, and manta rays, and whales, and you.”
– Edward Albee’s “Seascape”
“Find Your Beach”
– Corona Extra
Over the past five years, Alex G, real name Alex Giannascoli, has self-released several albums on his Bandcamp page (most of which are still up), slowly gathering a devout following of like-minded bands in the Philadelphia/Baltimore area and small tape labels like Orchid Tapes and the now-disgraced Birdtapes. With little to no presence online outside of his Bandcamp and little written about him elsewhere, Alex G’s path was calm, complementing the simple nature of his songs. Then around last year’s Orchid Tapes release of DSU, things picked up: the album sold out within hours, and before 2015 could get out of winter, he was signed to Domino Recording Company. The result is Giannascoli’s seventh album Beach Music, a decisive record that retains his candid melancholy and bleary, retreative tenor while progressing the pop-reflective song structure we’ve come to anticipate from the stable, forward climb of Alex G.
Like the overlying theme of college life in DSU, Beach Music summons warm, sandy images while its contents reveal a different beast. Where DSU cited the darker side of campus personalities and off-campus life, Beach Music is invaded with the troubles of leaving behind friends and family for the invasive, shitty aspects of touring. And like DSU’s “Harvey,” Beach Music’s first single “Bug” describes a tragic, repulsive personality. This time we’re introduced to an industry “yes man,” “a fuck brain just tryin to get himself paid,” as Alex G casts himself as a “bug in the crosshair” — an easy, squashable target. This moral contrast comes up again at the album’s tail end on “Station,” as three voices fall into each other, drowning each other out while recognizing the reason they’re all in it: to make a living. “If I could look past it, I’d be big and free.” “I got money and I got fame/ The only thing I don’t got is someone to blame.” The lines are two sides of the same coin, a flip for doubt or pomposity.
In contrast, Giannascoli’s life outside the sphere, away from home influences, streaks nude throughout. Calls like “don’t make me hurt you” on the reimagined version of “Salt” (previously found on his SALT EP) act as self-fixing pleas of a man fraught with uncertainties, with a hypnotizing vintage Yamaha keyboard drum machine patch playing underneath. “Brite Boy” is a call-and-response cry from an outsider waiting for the return of another. Emily Yacina (who also appears on DSU’s “Harvey,” “Hollow,” and “Skipper,” and Trick’s “Advice”) sings on “Mud,” a soft ballad for a bait’s prey, a figure behind the curtain in the same vain as Trick’s demonstrative “Kute.” Closer “Snot,” Beach Music’s quintessential Alex G song, features muffled lines like “I love him,” “666,” and “make me sick,” before riding off into the distance with lulled, confident guitar work, like a victor ready for another challenge.
Of all the possibilities after the success of DSU, the Lucky Number reissues (of Trick and Rules), and the massive media circus revolving around Beach Music, Alex G’s first major wax-plated step outside the bedroom is predictably secure. But it’s also exploratory of his changing landscape, one that’s situated like unauthorized speech-class notecards, articulating each situation and character but still allowing for cracks and incongruity. Luckily for us, we are left to its patchwork.
01. Intro
02. Bug
03. Thorns
04. Kicker
05. Salt
06. Look Out
07. Brite Boy
08. In Love
09. Walk
10. Mud
11. Ready
12. Station
13. Snot
Pitchfork 72
Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. Under the moniker of Alex G, he has made seven full lengths, most of which he put out himself. Beach Music is his Domino debut and, as he is poised to reach an even larger audience, he lets his weirder and darker instincts run rampant.
Giannascoli opens the curtains on Beach Music with a restless experiment that sounds like a cruddy bootleg of Aphex Twin trying to make beats for Scratch Acid. Distant yelling, electronic beats and lo-fi guitars all meet in a track that's less than a minute and sets the ground rules that this will not be Alex G's big, accessible breakthrough. He segues into "Bug", a traditional indie rock recipe of acoustic strums and stereo-panned electric guitars sprinkled with harmonics. The song is moody and intriguing, and just when you think it might be a good playlist candidate for a road trip with your parents, he warps his voice into Chipmunk territory on the line "bug in the crosshair".
Alex G has often used pitch-shifting, but he deploys it more than ever on Beach Music. "Brite Boy" sends his voice up a few notches to play a girl whose affection the title character will spurn and whose help he will reject, while "Station" brings his voice down so he can embody a homeless man breaking into a liquor store. And "Salt" features both high and low voices, like tribes of ogres and elves uniting in song.
These moments bring to mind the similar voice trickery of Ween, who formed just about 50 miles north of Havertown, Pennsylvania, where Giannascoli grew up. The difference between the two lies in their motivation: Ween used the trick for comic effect, but Alex G doesn’t seem like he’s goofing around. Ween wrote in the liner notes for The Pod that they were huffing Scotchgard while recording—though they've since said they were bluffing—but Alex G makes no narcotic admissions whatsoever. Regardless if the composition process involved new chemicals or not, it's clear that a lot of nefarious characters are lurking in these songs. Giannascoli's style has been compared to Elliott Smith in the past, and that's often been true of his presentation, but on Beach Music, it's as if the characters from Smith's darker songs have wandered over to Giannascoli's world, and they're a lot worse for wear.
Most of the songs have one-word titles and the lyrics are both vague and evocative. These traits come together best in the haunting and sweet "Mud". For this track, Giannascoli reaches beyond the pitch-shifter and gets an actual additional human being, Emily Yacina, to harmonize with him. When the pair repetitively whisper-sing, "I know something you don't know," your mind leaps to the worst conclusions of what this "something" could be, as nauseous keys creep into the arrangement and overtake the sounds of fingers skating up and down the frets of an acoustic guitar.
Some of the songs also feature the slightly atonal jangle that Pavement eventually claimed as their sound when they became a full band. What is remarkable about Beach Music is that some of these arrangements beg for you to dismiss them, the way you might have the very first time you heard Pavement, but what at first feels sloppy and clogged is actually intricate upon closer inspection. Complicated arrangements and gorgeous melodies reveal themselves to you as rewards for your patience. Over time, even the alien voices begin to sound natural, even inviting.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016