Apologies for the longer interlude between reviews, Gentle Reader. A long weekend reduced the amount of music listening time I had to meet the conditions of Rule #4.
Disc 1477 is…. Forced Witness
Artist: Alex Cameron
Year of Release: 2017
What’s up with the Cover? Alex Cameron looks like a skeevy street dealer here. Of course he won’t be selling any drugs with all those people filming him through the window. You might want to take your business down a deserted side alley, Alex. There’s a reason they do that.
How I Came To Know It: I got into Alex Cameron through his 2019 album, “Miami Memory” and this was just me drilling backward through his catalogue.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Alex Cameron albums. Of the three, I put “Forced Witness” in at #2, just a hair behind “Miami Memory” (reviewed at Disc 1462).
Ratings: 4 stars
“Forced Witness” represents a transition in Alex Cameron’s sound. He is beginning to leave behind the synth/organ approach on his first record but has not fully transitioned to the fuller instrumentation of 2019’s “Miami Memory”. The result is a delightful blend of electronica and seventies stadium rock, with a side of funk, disco, and a healthy dose of eighties pop.
Cameron has an ear for a pop hook, and the ones on “Forced Witness” have an anthemic quality that is amplified by the organ-forward arrangements. It is danceable, and fun and even though the subject matter is often dark and gritty, the music has a celebratory quality that will fool you otherwise.
The tunes also feature a lot of collaborator Roy Molloy’s saxophone. With the pop undercurrent to these tunes that saxophone risks running into painful eighties solos, but Cameron rarely lets that happen. Sure, it gets a bit much on “Stranger’s Kiss” but that song is rescued by virtue of being a duet with Angel Olsen, whose brilliance more than makes up for saxophone that – if I’m being fair – only goes on for maybe a bar too long, and only does so twice. Elsewhere on the record, Molloy’s sax shows a few flashes here and there, but only enough to make the songs feel more noble.
I’ve read that before Alex Cameron bared his soul on “Miami Memory” his albums tended to be written in the persona of a marginally employable musician of dubious moral character. While the line between Cameron and this character can feel fuzzy to the uninformed listener, there is definitely a whole lot of this greaseball character on “Forced Witness.” Listeners should enjoy these songs as stories, not autobiographies.
Cameron’s alter ego may appear obvious on the surface, but he hints at a lot of nuance underneath. The songs that were most “persona forward” had me wanting to see a movie loosely based on them. The character has the soul of poet, but the mind of a sexual deviant and the impulse control of a criminal.
Even when this guy is riding an emotional high, Cameron peppers the songs with imagery that suggests a lot of his victories will be fleeting or pyrrhic at best, with the potential to end in jail time. “Runnin’ Outta Luck” features a chorus with a rising celebratory melody, but with lyrics like:
“I'm a man on a mission, you're a stripper out of luck
And we're good in the back seat but we're better up front
And there's blood on my knuckles 'cause there's money in the trunk”
…you know that some combination of sirens and flashing lights are in their future. Still, I appreciate that oddly romantic “we’re better up front.” Something bad has happened, but the narrator and that stripper? Hey – they’re true partners.
I also love the oblivious bravado of a song like “Marlon Brando” where our anti-hero claims he feels like “Marlon Brando, circa 1999” and delivers less than reassuring pickup lines like “I'm pretty cooked but my shit is far from dead” while threatening the woman’s current boyfriend with physical violence. It left me hoping that the “stripper out of luck” from earlier comes to her senses at the next gas station.
The album is replete with clever turns of phrase, but even after multiple listens it didn’t get old and tired as sometimes happens. This is because the album isn’t kitschy, and while the main character in all of this is a total putz, he’s a damned interesting putz. He gets in pointless fights, surfs a whole lot of porn, and consistently thinks he’s way more awesome than he is.
Yet, Cameron lets you see this guy from the vantage point of inside his head; a warped perspective of the world behind rose coloured glasses and bloodshot eyes. Or as he narrates on “Politics of Love”, “The thought of this being wrong/Never had crossed my mind.” The result of this oblivious douchebaggery is a surprisingly compelling train wreck, attached to some genuinely catchy tunes.
Best tracks: Candy May, Country Figs, Runnin’ Outta Luck, Marlon Brando, Politics of Love
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