Can something be gentle and apocalyptic at the same time? (Sandy) Alex G’s latest album, “House of Sugar,” manages to be exactly that. The lo-fi pop and melancholic, Southern Gothic emptiness on “House of Sugar” is hard to place but familiar in a disturbing way — as if you woke up one morning as an alien and saw your own strange limbs for the first time.
“Walk Away” opens the album with a cycling refrain: “Someday I’m gonna walk away from you / not today, not today, not today.” It mourns the present, lifting up and swallowing its words and spitting them out again. A polyphonous, anxious cloud of sound orbits this single line. Leaving someone is a bitter but powerful feeling — the song speaks of this heartbreak; it seems to say: yes, “I’m gonna walk away from you,” but today I am choosing to revel in this happiness that will cause so much pain when lost. “Walk Away” meditates on this breaking point, sitting us in a limbo between yearning and leaving, burying a love alive.
On “Hope,” Alex G honors his friend who overdosed. The amorphic loss in “Walk Away” becomes acute as his friend cries out “Can you get me something else to eat? / Got a hole in my chest” in the delirious pain of his last night. “Hope” is painful and stark, and yet just like “Walk Away,” is conscious of an impending end: “In the house, they were callin’ out his name / All night, takin’ turns on the bed.” Alex’s voice joins those of his friends, who are grasping at the last moments of this man, attempting to summon him back to his body, their pleas encased in the patter of guitar.
At first listen, “House of Sugar” almost feels happy. Alex G’s soft, tepid acoustic sound on each song makes me think of feeling upset on a sunny day. The air around you is warm, but you are cold. Without a storm to mirror your feelings, to shout a terrible thunder on your behalf, any cloudiness inside of you is simply yours. I entered the “House of Sugar” as naïve as Hansel and Gretel, seeing at first a frosted, indie fairytale. But as I listened again, the eerie electronic sounds rang clearer. The album contains welcoming indie pop elements, yet it also narrows in on the distorted, metallic quality which appears on Alex G’s previous album, “Rocket.” “House of Sugar,” however, achieves an organic marriage of experimental elements and soothing melodies which were only developing on “Rocket.”
Hansel and Gretel are two children who have been rejected from home and stumble upon a fantastical house that satisfies their hunger and promises to harbor them. I see the titular “House of Sugar” as an illusory stand-in for home, a place which promises to quell the “hole in your chest,” only to lure you in and eat you up. Its shape as a house is a false symbol of safety, for sugar cannot sustain nor shelter you. The blend of familiar and strange instrumentation on “House of Sugar” evokes this illusion of familiarity. On “Gretel,” Alex sings: “Daddy don't let 'em turn me around / I don't wanna go back.” Unlike Hansel and Gretel, I don’t think Alex is returning home from the “House of Sugar” to live happily ever after, but recognizing a yearning for it even while knowing that it had discarded him.
“House of Sugar” voices the aches of leaving and attempting to carry oneself out whole from a sinking house. Here, ghosts are rising out from the people around us, and what we leave behind is whispering in our footsteps, humming in our trail through the woods.
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