ALEX G

Forget what you think that you know about Alex Giannascoli -  this record confounds all expectations, leaping from Sufjan-style melancholic string-fingering to thunderous distorted whirls and astounding vocal gymnastics - it's a box of surprises that keeps on giving with every trip back down the rabbit hole.

an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette. “God” figures in the new album from Philadelphia, PA based Alex Giannascoli's LP’s title, its first song, and multiple of its thirteen tracks thereafter, not as a concrete religious entity but as a sign for a generalized sense of faith (in something, anything) that fortifies Giannascoli, or the characters he voices, amid the songs’ often fraught situations. Beyond the ambient inspiration of pop, Giannascoli has been drawn in recent years to artists who balance the public and hermetic, the oblique and the intimate, and who present faith more as a shared social language than religious doctrine. As with his previous records, Giannascoli wrote and demoed these songs by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment,” he asked some half-dozen engineers to help him produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant.