(Sandy) Alex G’s music is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t mean that it’s frightening, and I certainly don’t mean that it’s bad. I mean that it seems to come from a place where the rules of reality seem strange and unfamiliar. Choruses descend from extraterrestrial octaves, autotune and fiddles live comfortably alongside one another, and the physics of a song may get snagged on brambles as the rest of a melody floats on unimpeded. The longtime idiosyncratic recording project of Philadelphia’s Alex Giannascoli—birthed in his teen years and incubated in a Temple University dorm room—turned Giannascoli into something of a reluctant DIY demigod, playing on Frank Ocean records, and never standing musically in a single place for very long. For one night, however, Boston’s Royale served as a container for the weird and excellent music Giannascoli has been putting out for nearly a decade.
In a refreshing act of composing a touring package of bands that the headliner clearly loves—as opposed to obligatory labelmates or sound-alikes—the show began with a pair of southern artists making music markedly different from Giannascoli’s. North Carolina has gifted the rest of the country with a few indispensable things. Among them: the Wright Brothers’ advent of flying, a particularly vinegary style of BBQ, and one of the most talented bands working today—Indigo de Souza. The Asheville quartet, led by the eponymous de Souza herself, produced an opening set light on tracks from 2018’s darkhorse LP, I Love My Mom, but heavy on locked-in near-disco jams. In a live setting, de Souza’s voice trembles on the precipice of a soulful almost-yodel, and reaches Houstonian heights with ease. My own lack of recognition of a few tracks left me overjoyed at the prospect of new music on the horizon from this band.
Following de Souza on the three-band bill was Louisville’s Tomberlin. Generally a solo artist, Sarah Beth Tomberlin was joined on a selection of her “sad bangers” by Ella Williams from Squirrel Flower, and (Sandy) Alex G guitarist Sam Acchione. The instrumental austerity of Tomberlin’s plucked acoustic guitar (and Acchione’s occasional electric accompaniment)—sparse and ethereal—was more than enough to fill the room with a collective “woah” as the focus drew the listener towards her confessional lyrics and powerful voice. You can compare her style to Julien Baker, or Justin Vernon, but Tomberlin is uniquely its own sound.
(Sandy) Alex G is not going through a pitch-shifting phase, mom. His signature touch of pushing vocals into a tastefully cartoonish realm is not a gimmick, it’s merely another instrument in Giannascoli’s arsenal. On stage however, even without the ability to send his voice into cold lunar orbit, Giannascoli thrived in his natural register. From new tracks like the dread-driven “Gretel,” and sticky trot of “Southern Sky”—kind of like Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” but if Win Butler chomped hay reeds and exclusively wore straw hats—to the rootsy violin-driven songs of Rocket; the five-piece band rarely relented, except to tease Pats fans. A full set and a fake walk-off later, the band came back for an eight (!) song encore. Giannascoli asked fans what they wanted to hear, and the band delivered from across the discography, punctuated by the parodic testosterone nursery rhyme of “Harvey” and the nauseous yearning of “Brite Boy.” (Sandy) Alex G songs are unsettling. They’re full of fear and attempts to recall scattered memory fragments—like watching Super 8 footage of someone else’s childhood. In a live setting they’re also powerful, executed at a volume you may not normally crank Giannascoli’s music up to, and entirely essential to anyone trying to wrap their arms fully around the strange and eclectic (Sandy) Alex G stereophonic universe.
Writers tend to call Alex Giannascoli mysterious, or enigmatic. This may come from the fact that Giannascoli’s style of storytelling leaves a great deal of ambiguity as to who the narrator of a song is—has he experienced these (often traumatic) things himself, or are we consuming fiction? But an even better question to ask is why we want to know so badly who he really is. No one puts that much effort into getting to know, say, Charlie Puth, probably because there just doesn’t seem like there’s much to know. Maybe Giannascoli seems deeper—an auteur of hours of Bandcamp rock with something profound to offer. Maybe it’s because he seems like a normal dude with as much interest in Carson Wentz’s passing stats as he has in messing around with GarageBand presets. Maybe it’s because of the lysergic Steamboat Willie iconography he deploys. Or it could be the impossible to pin down influences of his music—Phil Elverum equipped with Fisher-Price instruments? Robo-Elliott Smith goes country?—all of which likely means that the palette is too singularly Giannascoli’s to be compared to anything at all. In the live track, “SugarHouse,” that closes out his new LP, Giannascoli offers his own thoughts: “You’ve never really met me, I don’t think anyone has.” But of course, that too may all be fiction.
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Listen to (Sandy) Alex G’s magnificent new album, House of Sugar, here; Indigo de Souza’s all killer no filler debut full-length here; and stream Tomberlin’s self-proclaimed sad bangers here.
And don’t forget to rep merch from (Sandy) Alex G or Tomberlin; or support Indigo de Souza's music on Bandcamp here.
