His music sounds like someone took Elliot Smith and Washed Out tracks and smushed them underfoot using a mustard-yellow hand-me-down pair of Oxford shoes to give them character, and then ironed them out, kissed them with some bootleg Bob Dylan record and stuck them out the window to dry in some placeless, American suburban wasteland. These songs are pure middle-America lo-fi underground electronica mixed with moody, introspective acoustic folk-rock, blended with '90s grunge punk rock. They are understated, swept under the rug and half-crying in self-pity disguised as boredom. Raw like picked blisters, they are exquisite pieces of muffled lyrical genius. Alex Giannascoli -- lead singer and guitarist for his eponymous band Alex G -- is undeniably at the forefront of great American songwriting and it will only be a matter of time before this wunderkind takes the music world by storm.
Alex G was originally the solo project of Alex Giannascoli, who described the band’s forming in an interview with the Daily.
“I had a bunch of recordings -- I record myself a lot, ever since I was a kid. This band formed when people started asking us to play...asking me to play shows, and I wanted a full band, so I got these guys to play with me.”
Formerly a student at Temple University, Giannascoli described his decision to leave school to pursue music as an endeavor, since he did not have the time to manage the two.
He describes two of his biggest musical influences as Modest Mouse and Aphex Twin, the melange of electronic and harder punk rock evident in his work. Yet it is Giannascoli’s prowess as a songwriter that is finally getting him the wider recognition he so rightly deserves. With a stripped down minimalism and an aggressive detouring from the traditional verse-chorus-verse lyrical pattern, Giannascoli employs plays-on-words and naked descriptors. His lyrics are easy to swallow and hard to digest. “Black Hair,” off of the LP "DSU"(2014), features the lines “don’t hang up the phone / i love you to death / eternal return / eternal return / eternal return / eternal return,”while “Rejoyce,” also off “DSU,” fills a mere 12 lines on a song of 1:51 timeframe with enough compressed angst to supply an entire room full of 18-24 year-olds, still unsure of where to take their lives. The entirety of “Rejoyce's" lyrics follow, “ash / blowing through her hair / blowing out the window / selfish but / doesn’t mean a thing / bites you raw / i don’t wanna leave / i just wanna close the door / grass is growing up my legs / breaking up the floor / run from angela.”
For the complexity of his work, Giannascoli is unperturbed by, or perhaps ambivalent to, questions about his songwriting techniques.
“It’s not a lot of conscious effort," he says, "I just do what I think sounds cool. I try to keep it simple and ambiguous and have it sound cool and evoke cool images.” Yet his nuanced, truncated slices of middle American angst are gaining him wider recognition. Interviews in Fader and reviews in Rolling Stone rave about Giannascoli’s edging closer to the cusp of greatness.
Perhaps it is the humble beginnings of a musician of his caliber that has made Giannascoli shy away from easily falling for such high praise. After self-releasing his first two LPs -- “Rules”(2012) and "Trick”(2012) -- on Bandcamp, both albums are now being digitally remastered and sold en masse, to be re-released on April 6. This change, following years of simply shelling out goods one at a time to listeners online, indicates that the medium of the internet may have given Giannascoli a healthy dose of both cynicism and reality.
For now, the young poet envisions the future of the band as a continuation of the present.
“Shows like this are cool. Shows that we can make a living off of and we don’t have to be on tour every day of the year,” he said.
It is clear that Giannascoli not only knows exactly what’s he’s doing, but he also knows how to do it in order to achieve great success, if that is, in fact, the path he wants to take.
