Is there not a surplus of soft guitar, indie rock music? Yes, but that does not make Alex G excess to that requirement. An ever-increasing quota of acoustic beauties is asked for every year. It will never be enough to satisfy the minds of those who need to hear their troubles taken to song. Headlights, the Alex G album, not an attachment for the front of your car, scratches that itch of young love and older memories. What we learn is inevitable; how we hear it is the interchangeable quality. Headlights has that wallowing appeal. Let the heart set off on a course of its own, no matter how harmful it is to the head, to prospects of the future. We have all been there, and those who have not will be guided through rather haphazardly by Alex G. Sweet instrumentals and soft, detached musings on love are not as liberating as they once were. Not once you’ve found a love worth keeping.
Even then, Headlights is struggling irrespective of where your love life may be. It doesn’t matter if you’re six months or sixty years into a relationship, Alex G seems to think it’s futile. He holds firm to the wispy, lighter qualities of romanticised days. The best relationships kindle the so-called honeymoon feeling the whole way through. Headlights is romanticising the mundane in the hope of sparking new life. It sounds nice while it happens, but it works on false pretences. Real Thing and Afterlife are catchy pieces, but they are never close to capturing anything of real or meaningful style. Beam Me Up skirts a little too close to a Leonard Cohen poem featured in Book of Longing. The writing for love, for money, and it being the same thing, features in the opening lines of a song which rushes away from contemplations on intimacy and financial satisfaction. Instead, it reduces itself to emotionally unchallenging reflections of kicking balls and being in locker rooms.
Romanticising the early years of life is for people who have never experienced anything better than their days of youthful freedom. Relatively unconvincing songs like Spinning and Louisiana follow those indifferent early moments. Yet compared to the latter stages of the album, it feels like bright sparks of outstanding, well-thought-out meaning. But it’s far from that. Wistful pockets of loneliness projected as reflection. Hazy bedroom pop-like noise where the heavy-set percussion on Louisiana is meant to be hit your brain into a new way of thinking. A fresh attitude on life is a noble search, but you won’t find it on Headlights. A very dim album at the best of times, even if the instrumental sway has that nostalgic comfort, the familiarity which serves artists well when they don’t know what to do with themselves.
Any of the resounding moments Alex G has as an artist, with a touch on the emotional velocity of life, is lifted from some phrase or artists elsewhere. From soft references to Cohen to clear lifts of oranges falling from the tree, rather than apples. Oranges is a weak piece of work but at least it offers a break before Headlights’ high, Far and Wide. Even that feels more like a torch song for an ageing theatre student. A halfway point for the hero, whose reflections turn sour as the string section swells. Headlights’ predictability is its misery also. An acceptable title track and a run of relatively tame songs romanticising the life you already have is what, rather predictably, ends Headlights. At least Logan Hotel highlights how Alex G is perhaps worth catching live, should you suffer a bout of amnesia and forget just how poor Headlights is.
