In April 2015, I arrived early at the Metro in Chicago to get a good spot for Foxygen’s famously mercurial live show. After a few minutes, a lanky blonde in a windbreaker wandered onto the stage, fiddled with a monitor and a small stool, and tapped the mike. The house music had turned into a preprogrammed Casio rhythm, all electric hi-hats and elevator melodies, but the lights were still up and no one was paying close attention. We all thought he was a roadie until halfway into his first song. Another man soon joined him onstage with a saxophone, and they sang songs about a failing expat stockbroker in Hong Kong, a mom leaving her kid in the car to go get loaded, a man starting a new life on the internet. Very specific stories, crooned over pre-recorded drum tracks and minimal synthesizers punctuated with the occasional sax line from the bearded man on the stool. These men were grim bards singing the tales of lackluster individuals. I was fascinated.
Alex and Roy released their second album, Forced Witness, on Friday, and in doing so have introduced us to a new cast of failures. These are songs of men with active libidos, big egos, poor judgment, and a disrespect of women that would certainly be predatory were these characters not so impotent.
Sonically, it’s easy to draw parallels to The War on Drugs’ recent exploration of Springsteen on A Deeper Understanding – both albums pay tribute to the songcraft of the Boss, his sky-high anthems about the common man, his heart-grabbing chord changes and introspective accounts of hot, lonely nights – but while Adam Granduciel used the Springsteen touchstones (read: glockenspiel) to tap into the cloaked mysticism of middle America and the pathos of the characters therein, Alex does it winkingly. He is not here to celebrate or to dream along with these people; he is here to embody them and let their actions speak for themselves. It’s more “Baker Street” than E Street, more “Do It Again” than Born to Run.
Alex and Roy (along with some help from Angel Olsen and one of Springsteen’s most successful acolytes, Brandon Flowers), have created some lovely songs that make the characters occupying them easy to swallow. Flowers’ presence is felt on this album, and his ability to navigate the line between sincerity and melodrama is shared by Cameron, both lyrically and vocally – Cameron’s vocals on his debut album Jumping the Shark were more of a casino-buffet, loungey baritone, compared to the breathless heights on songs like “Runnin Outta Luck.” Flowers’ soft spot has always been creating clearly motivated characters (Jenny, Andy, and Mr. Brightside are archetypes at best), but when you couple his talent for anthems with Alex’s laser-focused storytelling, you have a blueprint for something special.
“Studmuffin96” opens with a cheery piano intro that could serve as a b-side to Elton John’s “Daniel,” but quickly subverts the romantic declarative “I’m waiting for my lover” by tacking on the phrase “she’s almost seventeen” (the legal age of consent in Sydney). “Stranger’s Kiss,” the tender yet somehow hilarious duet with Alex’s new friend and recent labelmate Angel Olsen, benefits from a stellar video directed by Jemima Kirke. Kirke is playing to type, and you can almost imagine Jessa Johansson weathering this avalanche of a relationship and the self destructive actions that follow. Alex tries to brag about his sexual prowess on this track, and his attempts are as dingy as the subway station in the video: “…it feels like I could just peel the gym pants off a single mother.” I wonder if this is the same mother from “Real Bad Lookin’,” recently divorced.
This album is full of people who think they are God’s gift to humanity and try to convince others of that fact. The shining example is “Candy May,” and its straightforwardness coupled with the slick production and inspired use of the electric piano makes it the best song on the album. “Candy May” is written with the air of a deflated man, left alone at a restaurant table, his date having stormed off after a fight, as he cockily explains to other patrons that “she’s fine, we’re fine.” It’s pathetic and passionate. The genius of the song hinges on the vagueness of lyrics like “’…cause Candy May, I know she loves me in her own true way / You call it as you see it, you think you know the score / But you just never had a girl like Candy May before.” This could be a tumultuous, flawed relationship between two people who love each other, or it could be a feeble attempt by an impotent man to woo an uninterested woman. In the context of this album, I’d bet on the latter.
Cameron is an unreliable narrator because he is a master ventriloquist; whatever his true thoughts on these vignettes are, he keeps them close to the vest and lets his puppets do the talking. So for someone listening to Forced Witness on shuffle, it may be jarring to hear the words “You tell that little faggot call me faggot one more time” on the penultimate, revelatory “Marlon Brando.” But that hostility is diffused by the time we reach that track, and we know that this is just another boorish, swaggering alpha male who thinks that he is entitled to everything and everyone. It is telling that Alex often makes reference to himself in these stories; he is playing the part of another, but emphasizes that the curtain dividing a good person from a scumbag is an easy one to fall through. Musically, the song is one giant delusion of grandeur: a flaccid synth as our hero describes his situation, slowly rising to a majestic classic rock instrumental build. It’s “Jack and Diane” driving across Indiana to the drums of “Africa,” and it’s gorgeous.
It’s disturbing that we experienced a news cycle this year where “pussy” was bandied about, in reference to women, as blithely as it is by the character in “The Chihuahua.” The song – a musical standout sliding into line with the schmaltz-revival of “A Savage Night at the Opera” and “Everything is Spoiled By Use” – is the lament of a man who is unable to sustain a relationship with a woman, reacting with whining, name-calling, and the sleazy comfort of internet porn as she walks out of his life. I don’t want to insinuate that Cameron is making a political statement, because that would mislabel the subtlety at work in his music. What I am saying is that we ought to empathize with the absent lover in this song (and the unseen women in all of these songs); we are meant to leave this man behind. We are meant to leave this type of man, this type of masculinity, in the bygone eras occupied by the musical influences that Cameron uses to frame his cast of characters. Intentional or not, the music of Forced Witness dates these men. The toxicity of the alpha male has aged faster than a Glass Tiger single. Alex has witnessed these manboys, documented them in his own unique way, and shared them with us, equipping us to easily spot the same dangerous bullshit present in ourselves and those around us. It’s an “easy listening” soundtrack to a hard look at our society.
-Austin Sisson
0 Comments