Tony Stamp reviews Alex G's experimental folk-rock, neo-soul jams by Ari Lennox, and punk primitivism from No Age.
God Save the Animals by Alex G
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Alex Giannascoli uploaded his first songs onto MySpace when he was 12 years old. He’s 29 now, and has spent the interim years building a fanbase through a steady stream of releases, all of them recorded at home and released under the abbreviation Alex G.
His ninth, God Save the Animals, is the first to be partly recorded in a professional studio, but aurally there’s not much difference between it and earlier efforts. It is the kind of album it’s very hard not to get excited about though, a collection of 13 songs that are each fantastic on their own merits, and together coalesce into something even greater.
He draws on a lineage of great singer-songwriters, the most apparent of which might be the late Elliott Smith. Barely a moment passes on any song without a great melody, whether it’s vocal or otherwise. The way they build up and cascade is a big part of the album’s pleasures.
What differentiates him is a willingness to experiment, most notably with his voice. On this album it’s often pitched up or down an octave, or manipulated in other ways.
He described it to Pitchfork recently as the difference between using an actor vs a computer generated character. He also surrounds it with real world instruments like acoustic guitar and piano, in ways that, on paper, shouldn’t work, but generate real aural magic.
Occasionally songs seem to mirror each other, which might just be his fondness for certain chord progressions, but it adds up to the feeling that the album is a tapestry to be unpicked.
In interviews he isn’t coy about lyrics, but honest about them being a mix of real experiences and poetic licence. He’s a guy who operates on instinct, and much like the impulse to distort his voice, he’s just chasing a feeling rather than anything conceptual.
Occasionally though there’s a song like ‘Miracles’, disarming in how straightforward it is, and the way it harks back to someone like Neil Young. Alex sings about him and his partner deciding to have a child, and pondering his future as a songwriter, and it’s devastatingly lovely.
The thing that sold me on Alex G is his way with melody, but what keeps me coming back to God Save the Animals beyond that is the curveballs he consistently throws into his songs: blasts of distortion, unexpected jazz or blues chords, a sudden drum machine frenzy all happen, and never seem out of place.
Several tracks have him whispering, voice mangled beyond recognition, and somehow it works perfectly alongside the more traditional songs - more than that, it feels necessary somehow.
It’s an album that’s immediately in best-of-the-year contention, and the more I sit with it, the more I find things to love.
age/ sex/ location by Ari Lennox
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The line between art and artist is often blurred, especially in pop music, where there’s an assumption that the character portrayed through lyrics, photoshoots and music videos is the musician themselves, and that’s not always the case.
In January the neo-soul singer Ari Lennox swore off doing interviews after a podcaster asked about her sex life, emboldened by the apparent candidness she shows in her songs. The incident has stuck to her, to the degree that I’m mentioning it here, but it’s a shame, because Lennox’s music is very good, and deserves to be heard on its own terms, brimming as it is with charm and sinuous melodies.
She’s often compared to Erika Badu and Jill Scott, and on ‘Pressure’, looks back to 70s singer Shirley Brown, sampling a snatch of vocal from her song ‘Blessed is the Woman’, and interpolating a particularly sunny bassline.
The lyrics in that song are a cavalcade of ribald wordplay, never explicit but somewhere nearby. On ‘Hoodie’ she manages to eroticise that piece of clothing, with a particularly amusing shout out to apparel makers North Face.
Lennox clearly has a powerful set of pipes, and uses them to emphasise and emote rather than vamp. On album-opener ‘POF’ there’s an autobiographical detail when she refers to a “young Black woman approaching 30 with no lover in her bed”, then when she belts out the chorus, it’s to defiantly complain that there may be plenty of fish in the sea, but the ones swimming to her aren’t up to standard.
Every song on age/ sex / location is informed by Ari Lennox’s sexuality - or at least, the version of herself she presents through her music. The music itself is sexy, in the rhythm, timbres and her soulful melodies. And lyrically, it’s often wryly funny, a deceptively mature outlook on dating in your late twenties, that’s always self-empowering.
People Helping People by No Age
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Of all the self-descriptive album titles out there, the 2007 compilation Weirdo Rippers is particularly apt. It collected early singles from the LA band No Age, who operated at the nexus point where performance art met indie rock. They were weird, but the songs undoubtedly ripped.
Their latest is called People Helping People, and that too seems appropriate: for a band mellowing with age, but also our current era, when empathy is in short supply. The record splits the difference between surprisingly soothing soundscapes, with the kind of crude but tuneful songs they made their name on.
Guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/ singer Dean Spunt have always traded in a kind of punk primitivism. They’re tagged as noise rock but tend to branch out wider than that. This album is their first to be self-produced, and recorded in a home studio in Randall’s garage.
The liner notes allude to a lack of time pressure, which evidently encouraged experimentation. It’s an album that’s deliberately formless.
Two tracks in on 'Çompact Flashes’ the guitar is barely present apart from a light picking, with Spunt singing over two layers of drums - one played, one programmed, but plenty of other songs deploy the six-string with Randall’s usual arsenal of fireworks.
‘Flutter Freer’ is looped and noisy, but listen closely during what passes for a chorus, and you’ll hear a thoroughly accomplished bit of unaffected guitar playing - the sort of virtuosity No Age usually shun.
Around a third of these tracks could comfortably be called ambient music, made up of swirling guitar effects and often light on rhythm. One of these opens the album with the slightly aggressive title ‘You’re Cooked’.
They're a band who clearly aren’t for everyone. Fans of guitar stomp may be turned off by the mellower tracks, and vice versa, and Spunt’s tuneless vocals won’t be for everyone. But People Helping People has a sense of freedom that’s rare - a band left to their own devices, and truly making the most of it.
