Review: Alex Calder - Strange Dreams
By Jordan Matthiass, Contributor
[Captured Tracks; 2015]
Rating: 3/10
Key Tracks: “Little Purpose” (feat. Caitlin Loney)
Alex Calder has a new album, his first, Strange Dreams. You may know Calder as the gross kid from Gummo who eats dirty bathtub chocolate. Okay, not really. That’s a different guy, but Alex Calder looks a lot like that kid (all grown up).
You want to know something about Gummo? It’s detestable. It’s a morally handicapped film that features cats being killed, paralytics being abused in their beds and multiple distressing molestation attempts. But you want to know something else? It’s a triumph. It throws out these psychological hurdles in a way that gives the watcher a deep-seated discomfort. That discomfort in turn forces the watcher to confront their own moral shortcomings. Is one supposed to enjoy something so sickening?
Want to know something about Strange Dreams? It’s just as narcotically produced and stomach-churning as Gummo, but it reaches its own state of brokenness without any nods to introspection or hints of self-awareness.
Here, Alex Calder calls to mind the gross bathtub water featured so frighteningly in Gummo via a swirly vomit of hazed acoustic guitars played over equally somnambulant keys and drum. Strange Dreams is a certifiably strange spiral into the thinly-insulated womb of a heroin addict. Everything is soft around the edges and there’s a warm glow radiating from somewhere, but there is also a discomforting distortion of reality presented in a way that is, to the sober among us, infuriatingly nonreal and warped.
There are pop chords and beachy vocals hidden away somewhere, but these are run through the heroin womb filter to the point that they inspire intense nausea. Wavves on bad acid is still Wavves, so maybe this is Wavves on a really sketchy meth bender?
It’s not surprising that this puke-fest is brought about by a person who once played drums for Mac Demarco, everyone’s favorite goofball-cum-stupid-indie-culture-starlet. Strange Dreams is basically an even more disorienting Salad Days with the high end and tongue-in-cheek humor cut all the way out.
The first three quarters of Calder’s 2015 LP are all pretty lifeless and pretty vexing, but things start to lighten up with “Life Purpose,” which features Caitlin Loney. She’s honestly the only reason I even looked up to check the title. It’s still maybe not that good, but it at least stands out. The female vocals mesh a lot better with the weird swirl of guitar and keys. You’ll note that this effect is titled the “Lush Principle,” popularized by Lush, whose instrumentals were also kind of sickening, but who made up for it with damn good female vox.
Anyway, after “Life Purpose,” things almost immediately go back to murky bathwater territory. “Mid Life Holiday” is another surprisingly okay cut, featuring some guitar work with true purpose that, for once on the record, drives a solid undercurrent of acceptably-refined haze. But, after these two tracks of somewhat higher-order mediocrity play out, things devolve again before the album, thankfully, ends. I can feel my stomach settling already.
I recommend Strange Dreams only to heroin addicts and Mac Demarco evangelists, because those are the only people who have bodies capable of handling material this smoggy.
