By Barry Divola
Alex G’s Headlights: An indie star levels up.Credit:
Alex G, Headlights
Contradictions? Alex G, full name Alex Giannascoli, has a bunch of them.
The Philadelphia musician-producer shuns social media, but The Fader once called him “the internet’s secret best songwriter” as he made his name online via word-of-mouth blogs and message boards, self-releasing albums and EPs on Bandcamp.
He’s got a lot to say on record – he’s only 32, and Headlights is his 10th album – but many interviewers have found that trying to get him to talk about himself or his music is like pulling teeth, and his stage presence was once described in a live review as “almost shockingly dull”, with that summation coming from a critic who declared Alex G was his favourite musician of the last decade.
Although he’s often compared to ’90s indie acts, including Elliott Smith, Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, he’s possibly better known to general pop audiences for contributing to eight tracks on Halsey’s The Great Impersonator and for writing and singing on Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Endless, and also playing in his touring band.
Headlights marks a shift from indie label Domino to major label RCA, not that you’ll notice a huge difference in Giannascoli’s approach. June Guitar opens proceedings, not with any fanfare but with a feather-light touch, on a gauzy, meditative song that hugs a lane close to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.
Alex G, aka Alex Giannascoli.Credit: Chris Maggio
First single Afterlife wears its country-folk influences on its sleeve, from the sparkling mandolins and acoustic guitar to the video set at a square dance, as Giannascoli recounts a revelation of some sort, singing “when the light came, big and bright, I began another life”.
A couple of tracks push the meter into the red – Louisiana offsets dreamy Auto-Tuned vocals with sledgehammer drums; Bounce Boy has octave-leaping bass, fuzzy synth and an electro-clap beat.
But much of the record relies on subtle dynamics and poetic songwriting to carry the weight, the drums approached gently with brushes, rimshots or a light tap, the guitars largely acoustic and Giannascoli’s vocals intimate.
He echoes a couple of past masters of the form here and there: Elliott Smith on the angular playing and cooing vocal of Spinning; Mark Kozelek in his Red House Painters days on Beam Me Up, where he lays out the realities of life as a creative person: “Some things I do for love, some things I do for money, it ain’t like I don’t want it, it ain’t like I’m above it.”
It’s not the only time he mentions the dreaded dollar and the need for it to survive and keep doing what he does. On Real Thing, he states it plainly: “Hoping I can make it through to April on whatever’s left of all this label cash/no, I never thought I was the real thing, there were certain tests I thought I would pass.”
For a guy who tours regularly, has worked with some of the bigger names in pop, has soundtracked movies (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow) and is by any measure a pretty popular artist, it’s a frank admission. And it’s something that he hasn’t mentioned in interviews. But then, that’s not the Alex G way. Why yack about it to a journalist when you can put it in a song? After all, as you can see, the journalist will write about it anyway.
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