(2021) Alex Rex - Paradise


Review:
It’s typical of the way Alex Neilson goes about his business that Paradise – the fourth Alex Rex album in total and the third in a little over two years – should sound both completely different and instantly recognisable. Neilson is one of the most distinctive and continuously excellent songwriters around, but he is also one of the most restless. His working practice embraces contradiction. He wears his influences proudly, and yet he is an experimentalist at heart, always willing to push boundaries. An avant-garde drummer by trade, he chooses to kick off opener ‘LowLife’ with the simplest of programmed drum patterns and the lyric ‘Lord, I can’t stand what I’ve become.’ It’s a strange old concoction: self-reinvention meets apparent self-loathing, but one that Neilson always seems to pull off with a knowing wink. That opening line aside, Paradise represents something of a lightening of mood in the wake of its downbeat predecessors. The backing vocals throughout – and particularly on The Dark Inside The Shadow – are pitched somewhere between the narcotic blowout of Gene Clarke’s No Other and Street Legal-era Dylan. But there is little trace of the bombast of either of those albums. Most of these songs are brief. Down-and-out ditty Scandalise The Birds has a subtle organ running through it that is almost devotional while Dancing Flame is a kind of satanic shanty with searing whips of electric guitar. On What’s Shouted In The Dark (The Dark Shouts Back), the backing vocals suddenly come over all B53s-meets-Raincoats, but as the song progresses, it ends up sounding something like Nick Cave caught in a ragged post-punk fever dream. Neilson’s songwriting reached its bleak apogee in last year’s Andromeda, a masterpiece of disillusionment. While the mood on Paradise is generally more positive, the penchant for self-examination remains. Most immediately confessional is The Great Experiment (arguably, and somewhat ironically, the least experimental song here), an acoustic country-tinged ballad that could have been a Trembling Bells demo but is a perfect example of Neilson’s tender singer-songwriter side. Elsewhere, Funeral Bouquet is gothic doom-folk, and the sweetly psychedelic country of Black Peonies is full of the fruity humour he perfected on songs like Amy, May I from 2019’s Otterburn. For the most part, though, there is a relentlessness which is, if not punky, then at least garagey. This is aptly down to circumstance: Neilson recorded most of these songs in the early stages of lockdown, and without much time to settle into a creative working pattern, he limited the recording to a maximum of three takes per song. The fact that his musicians had never heard the songs before lends a sense of freshness and discovery to the whole project. The name Alex Rex encompasses a rotating roll-call of musicians, and this iteration is the most stripped-back yet – Neilson is accompanied by former Trembling Bells bandmate Lavinia Blackwall on backing vocals, while a kind of zoned out power trio aesthetic is achieved by the addition of Marco Rea and long-term collaborator Rory Haye, whose guitar occupies an intriguing space between a full-on lysergic screech and punk minimalism. The only other addition is Kacy Lee Anderson from Canadian folk duo Kacy and Clayton, who provides one of the album’s many highlights, dueting with Neilson on the aforementioned Black Peonies. A short a cappella closing track has been something of a calling card for Neilson since his Trembling Bells days, and he doesn’t disappoint. Every Wall Is A Wailing Wall rejoices in its own grime while dissecting the link between personal pain and creativity. It’s a strange and stirring minute and a half, and it encapsulates Neilson’s unique worldview. His aphoristic approach to songwriting means that every line he writes sounds like a defining statement, but on Paradise, those statements come together (albeit in a ragged and even contradictory way) to form perhaps his most rewarding piece of work to date.





Track Listing:
1.LowLife 03:43
2.The Dark Inside The Shadow 02:27
3.Scandalise The Birds 02:33
4.Dancing Flame 03:10
5.What’s Shouted In The Dark (The Dark Shouts Back) 04:11
6.The Great Experiment 02:44
7.I Remember 01:39
8.Funeral Bouquet 02:36
9.Ida 02:48
10.Black Peonies 03:33
11.Silver Apples Of The Moon 03:37
12.Man Is A Villain 05:50
13.Every Wall Is A Wailing Wall 01:30


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits