Listening to: "God Save the Animals" by Alex G
One of my favorite albums, and concerts, of the past year or so
Hello and welcome to “Listening To,” a hopefully recurring feature here in which I write about something I’m listening to.
Earlier this summer, I watched the indie rock producer and singer-songwriter Alex Giannascoli (stage name: Alex G) perform with his band in Prospect Park. Two acts, including the outstanding Canadian band Alvvays, had preceded him, but when he took the stage, I felt a special kind of anticipation for a couple reasons. As a relatively new listener, I wasn’t sure what to expect of his live show. And second, though I didn’t know how I might achieve this, I was hoping to gain some deeper understanding of his recent album, God Save the Animals, which has both thrilled and puzzled me since I first heard it.
The show didn’t give me many answers, but it allowed me to make a few observations. Some songs from God Save the Animals — even several with unconventional structures and few vocals — became anthemic singalongs in the presence of a crowd. Clad in a t-shirt and jeans, Giannascoli emanated an ambiguous sort of calm that, depending on the song, could be read as the serenity of the deeply spiritual or the dispassion of a slacker. (I forget exactly what he told the audience in the infrequent instances where he spoke, but it was generally along the lines of, “Thanks... I hope you enjoyed that.”)
Giannascoli’s live show consisted of a four-piece band and a fairly basic setup. Yet in the course of their performance, the group drew from a broad sonic palette, incorporating Autotune, synthesizers, and atmospheric effects, at some points buffeting the audience with distorted walls of sound.
In other words, it reflected some of the tensions in Giannascoli’s music that I find so interesting: how his lyrics contain weighty themes and evocative imagery that seem to gesture towards some bigger concept or point, but never settle on straightforward messages or meanings; and how he has managed to pull from an eclectic set of influences to make a wide variety of music while still maintaining a distinctive, unified voice and brand across his work.
As the title of God Save the Animals suggests, religious and explicitly Christian imagery are scattered throughout the lyrics, but the more one listens, the less they seem to amount to much. Sometimes these bits come in the form of simple banalities: “Forgive yesterday, ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo / I choose today, uh-huh, huh,” he belts at the beginning of “Forgive,” channeling a kitschy refrigerator magnet.
And: “We’ve got better pills than ecstasy / They’re miracles and crosses, miracles and crosses,” he sings in, well, “Miracles.” In the world of God Save the Animals, these symbols of spirituality are simultaneously exalted and compared to recreational psychedelics. (Mentions of drugs, addiction, and dealing may not be in the title, but run throughout the album as well.)
Some of this could be a joke. “God is my designerrr / Jesus is my lawyerrr,” Giannascoli — who, by the way, is not religious — warbles through a thick blanket of Autotune on the cryptic “S.D.O.S.”
Despite these quirks, though, each of those songs remain sonically and lyrically captivating. Also, not only is there vocal processing and pitch-shifting on some tracks, but sometimes Giannascoli alters his own voice organically, dropping to a more subdued delivery. Is he whisper-chanting “Ain’t it easy” on the song of the same name, or is he really saying “Ain’t at ease?” When the repetitive backing vocals on “Runner” go, “Load it up, know your trigger like the back of my hand,” is he deliberately pronouncing it in a way that hints at a more sinister sentence?
Giannascoli’s vocals, in both their content and sound, make for a deceptively challenging listen. But similarly exciting is the grab bag of musical influences that he pulls from.
A decent amount of coverage has discussed how parts of the album dabble in hyperpop — the highly synthesized, Autotune-saturated Gen Z genre associated with acts like 100 gecs and glaive. Indeed, when the Latin groove and lush acoustic guitar of “No Bitterness” segue into a heavily Autotuned, distorted bridge, it makes for quite the climax. A processed, pitch-shifted voice expresses emotion and vulnerability in a way that an unaltered, unadorned one might not have.
But there is much more going on in the other songs where Giannascoli branches out, too — from the tresillo in “Cross the Sea,” which evokes reggaeton, to the ostinato vocal melody in “Immunity,” where he embraces something akin to Autotuned sing-rapping over a lush, repetitive beat. Don’t forget the talk of God and the folksy affect he adopts in several of the songs. Is that contemporary pop-country seeping its way in?
In other songs, he veers elsewhere; the jazzy and off-kilter piano and guitar at the end of “Immunity,” or the alternation between an overpowering synthesized drone and menacing, Pixies-esque verses in “Blessing.” (The latter is pretty directly inspired by the post-grunge classic, “Like a Stone” by Audioslave.) And at the same time, he leaves room for more conventional songwriting, with often-stellar execution — “Mission,” “Runner,” “Early Morning Waiting,” “Ain’t it Easy.”
Giannascoli has managed to toss together little vignettes and scraps of different genres in a way that makes a listener feel as though he is gesturing at some unknown whole. He seems to have absorbed these musics, concepts, and aesthetics, filtered them through his own tendencies as a songwriter and producer, and spat them out into an often beautiful album that raises more questions than it answers.
Is it about God? Maybe. Is it about animals? There are a few lyrics that compare people to dogs, but I don’t really think so. Is it about anything? Not sure, but you get the sense that it is. If not, the album is at least a testament to the potency a well-written song, or a fascinating soundscape, can lend to the simplest and most repetitive lyrics — the suggestion that they serve a higher purpose.
Here, I was about to write that God Save the Animals was one of the best albums of the past year. Then I double-checked the release date and realized it came out over a year ago. Maybe that’s fitting, though: despite how current some of the album’s influences are, they are thrown together in a disorienting enough way that it feels unmoored from any particular point in time. Dense with information and sparse with context, it is not flawless, but could prove timeless.