Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. Under the moniker of Alex G, he has made seven full lengths, most of which he put out himself. Beach Music is his Domino debut and, as he is poised to reach an even larger audience, he lets his weirder and darker instincts run rampant.
Giannascoli opens the curtains on Beach Music with a restless experiment that sounds like a cruddy bootleg of Aphex Twin trying to make beats for Scratch Acid. Distant yelling, electronic beats and lo-fi guitars all meet in a track that's less than a minute and sets the ground rules that this will not be Alex G's big, accessible breakthrough. He segues into "Bug", a traditional indie rock recipe of acoustic strums and stereo-panned electric guitars sprinkled with harmonics. The song is moody and intriguing, and just when you think it might be a good playlist candidate for a road trip with your parents, he warps his voice into Chipmunk territory on the line "bug in the crosshair".
Alex G has often used pitch-shifting, but he deploys it more than ever on Beach Music. "Brite Boy" sends his voice up a few notches to play a girl whose affection the title character will spurn and whose help he will reject, while "Station" brings his voice down so he can embody a homeless man breaking into a liquor store. And "Salt" features both high and low voices, like tribes of ogres and elves uniting in song.
These moments bring to mind the similar voice trickery of Ween, who formed just about 50 miles north of Havertown, Pennsylvania, where Giannascoli grew up. The difference between the two lies in their motivation: Ween used the trick for comic effect, but Alex G doesn’t seem like he’s goofing around. Ween wrote in the liner notes for The Pod that they were huffing Scotchgard while recording—though they've since said they were bluffing—but Alex G makes no narcotic admissions whatsoever. Regardless if the composition process involved new chemicals or not, it's clear that a lot of nefarious characters are lurking in these songs. Giannascoli's style has been compared to Elliott Smith in the past, and that's often been true of his presentation, but on Beach Music, it's as if the characters from Smith's darker songs have wandered over to Giannascoli's world, and they're a lot worse for wear.
Most of the songs have one-word titles and the lyrics are both vague and evocative. These traits come together best in the haunting and sweet "Mud". For this track, Giannascoli reaches beyond the pitch-shifter and gets an actual additional human being, Emily Yacina, to harmonize with him. When the pair repetitively whisper-sing, "I know something you don't know," your mind leaps to the worst conclusions of what this "something" could be, as nauseous keys creep into the arrangement and overtake the sounds of fingers skating up and down the frets of an acoustic guitar.
Some of the songs also feature the slightly atonal jangle that Pavement eventually claimed as their sound when they became a full band. What is remarkable about Beach Music is that some of these arrangements beg for you to dismiss them, the way you might have the very first time you heard Pavement, but what at first feels sloppy and clogged is actually intricate upon closer inspection. Complicated arrangements and gorgeous melodies reveal themselves to you as rewards for your patience. Over time, even the alien voices begin to sound natural, even inviting.
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