When talking about an artist like Alex G, you’d be foolish not to mention diversity. The Philadelphia-breed singer/songwriter has built a discography filled with sharp sonic turns and complex melodies that create his one-of-a-kind approach to indie bedroom rock. Alex G began his career like many others, recording himself in his home and handling everything from the writing to the mastering of his earlier releases, but what spawned out of these home recordings is a fruitful and creatively-daring career. Coming off the heels of his first endeavor into soundtrack work, Alex G gifts us with his eighth studio album God Save The Animals, a 13-song album that is the artist’s most challenging release to date, filled to the brim with complex lullabies and intricate experimentation.
Alex G’s vocals have been evolving over the years, you hear him begin to experiment a little bit with voice filters on his last album, 2019’s House of Sugar, but on this latest release, he dives even deeper into this new territory. Track 1, “After All”, the whole ballad is filtered through this cartoonish, falsetto filter that adds an air of mysticism to the song, he then switches up on the following song as his tone slips into a baritone rasp. This new style of vocal mixing was a risk that paid off tremendously for Alex G, his artistic vision on God Save The Animals seems unencumbered by anything besides what is best for this specific track. Alex G balances experimentation and his bedroom roots seamlessly on this album, not too overproduced but not afraid to take it that extra step further, a difficult task for anyone but here, he makes it look easy.
After a few listens to this album you start to pick up on the lyrical content and just how focused he really was on making God Save The Animals a concept album of some kind, in fear of pointing out the obvious, the concept of God plays a huge role here. All over the 13 songs presented here, you hear Alex G mention religion countless times but in various contexts. As the instrumental from track one breaks down, hushed whisper chimes in to tell us “People go away but God with me he stayed”, an almost haunting way for Alex G to explore such a deep topic. On “No Bitterness” God appears in the form of a child’s purity, these are just the most striking examples of how Alex G views religion and how he explores its concepts through the lens of an average guy. His poetic, almost cryptic songwriting style becomes even more ominous on this album as he evolves into a true novelist to tell the story behind God Save The Animals.
While Alex G’s primary instrument has always been the guitar, his latest offering introduces us to a new side of his production. He implements tangled drum patterns and pounding piano melodies that add an undeniable depth to the production of this album. A song like “No Bitterness” can be seen as a milestone in Alex G’s career, the culmination of years of production work. The innocence of the songwriting and beauty of the vocal layering swell up to a hectic cluster of distorted drums and auto-tuned drenched sonics. This is just one example of how the Philadelphia native’s production style has evolved on God Save The Animals, he’s replacing dusty guitar loops with lush, more full-sounding acoustic sections and hard-hitting drums, this album is almost incomparable to his previous releases.
On God Save The Animals, Alex G creates his best music to date. The textures are as complex as its lyrical content and it’s all strung together beautifully through intricate piano sections. Throughout this album, we see calculated risks pay off in a major way to create a colorful yet challenging album and one that requires multiple listens to fully understand Alex G’s end goal on his latest LP. Overall, these 13 songs switch from classic rock style production to hyper pop in just seconds, proving Alex G’s diversity and innate talent for crafting amazing records.
