Alex G ‘Headlights’ Review: Pushing Weird into the Light

For some, the mere considered being seen is like standing alone on a darkish highway as a automobile’s shiny lights lock onto you. Will the individual in the automobile discover you in time or will they strike you? An analogous stress jolts by means of Alex G’s tenth studio album—and main label debut—Headlights. It doesn’t shrink back from the glare, however fairly steps into it.

Naturally, there’s a query of whether or not a much bigger platform may sand away the lo-fi scuzz and elusive storytelling that made Alex a cult determine. The attractive however unusual Headlights, although, resists that flattening at each flip. Alex retains the curtains open simply sufficient to allow us to observe the weirdness that also dwells inside. He lets the mild forged throughout the mess—the cracks in the drywall, the splintering picket ground, and uneven paint—not out of reluctance, however with the quiet confidence of somebody who is aware of being unashamedly himself is sufficient.

Although his music has advanced over the years—a sluggish unfurling from lo-fi mutterings to widescreen Americana surrealism—Headlights nonetheless feels like Alex G. Every tune looks like a reintroduction to the unusual emotional language he’s all the time spoken—generally whispered, generally scrambled past sense. His supply doesn’t make clear a lot as conceal, slipping between soft-spoken sincerity and cryptic detachment.

Alex does this by means of pictures which might be each mundane and legendary, intimate and uncanny. Some flicker with the heat of an previous VHS tape, like on “Beam Me Up,” an odd, sci-fi-tinged imaginative and prescient of Americana the place rabbits run towards loss of life and rockets and footballs are launched into the sky. Elsewhere, the techno prayer “Bounce Boy” glows with Auto-Tuned sorrow—grief and heartbreak disguised as a hook: “Nobody replaces/My coronary heart in braces.”

The gothic, ghostly imagery of “Louisiana”—painted M16s, buried our bodies, bullets in a field—evokes misplaced love, grief, and violence like a half-remembered reminiscence. The that means behind these pictures, and the songs they inhabit, is sort of tough to pin down, however that ambiguity is an invite to sit down with them and resist searching for simple that means.

And so, as the mud settles, moments emerge the place Alex himself comes throughout unrecognizable. His vocals flutter in a fragile, childlike register on “Far and Extensive,” paying homage to Daniel Johnston. “I’m all in items,” he sings with unassuming pleasure, prefer it’s nothing and the whole lot all of sudden. “I’ve searched far and vast/For a spot like this/Now I can shut my eyes,” he continues, admitting that being shattered isn’t the finish, however a flip towards simplicity. The “items”—butterflies, boats, and falling stars—aren’t simply stray pictures, however emotional artifacts.

Headlights, although, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It echoes with the influences that possible formed Alex G. The brooding crawl of “Louisiana,” with its slow-motion menace and distortion-frayed pleading, suggests Weezer’s “Undone – The Sweater Track,” whereas “Spinning” unfurls like an Elliott Smith demo, solely a tick extra pressing, as Alex’s desperation curls inward line by line.

Elsewhere, the affected person, fingerpicked reflection of “June Guitar” may trick your ear into listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Quick Automobile,” whereas the dust-kissed shimmer of “Oranges” feels lit by the similar sundown that warmed Neil Younger’s Harvest. These aren’t overt homages a lot as passing glances filtered by means of Alex’s personal unusual, instinctual lens.

Alex has allowed himself to stay bizarre however unguarded. That’s the quiet miracle of this file. There’s no pageantry, no panic about being something apart from himself—only a sluggish, at occasions wayward shaping of sound and emotion into one thing that would solely come from one artist.

And after we attain the album’s penultimate monitor—the bittersweet “Is It Nonetheless You in There?,” which wouldn’t in any respect really feel misplaced in a Charlie Brown particular—its titular query lands with power. After the label deal, the scale shift, the shiny lights washing over the whole lot, what’s left? Headlights, in all its charming, disparate items, solutions: “Right here I’m. Sure, it’s nonetheless me.”