Welcome to Ear 2 Da Sky! Each week, I will be going over topics within music culture and reviewing albums and EPs across genres, eras and artists that are submitted by readers and listeners of my radio show every Monday at 11 p.m. on WHUS 91.7 FM! For this week’s submission, I gave Alex G’s “Trick” a listen.
Alex Giannascoli, more professionally known as Alex G, originally released his fourth studio album, “Trick,” in the fall of 2012. It was later re-released with professional mixing in 2015 after he signed to a record label. “Trick” clocks in at 37 minutes with a healthy number of songs — 16 to be exact. This project grows on the auditory ideas from his previous albums, as well as adding on some new ones.
The album opens up with “Memory.” As Alex waits to pick up drugs, he talks about his usage and self-medication. He reminisces on a mixtape given to him by a friend — a gift and gesture that takes an extensive amount of time and care — using the words and emotions of artists to convey your own. Alex is left with mixed signals of the tape’s meaning as it had “A lot of positive messages / And something left unclear.” The song closes with a sample from the show “Everybody Loves Raymond,” where Brad Garrett’s character, Robert, becomes philosophical on the idea of the possibility of the infinity of space; lasting forever, never able to live with the risk of abandonment.
This is accompanied by “Forever,” the second track off the album. This is a follow-up to the sample of Brad Garrett’s character questioning the expansiveness of space. As Alex floats along this indie folk and rock-blended instrumental, he speaks on this idea of having “forever” with someone. He speaks on it seemingly from a place of fear of abandonment as well as the need to people-please, as he is scared to mess up and possibly be left alone, ironically, forever.
Track 11, and one of the more popular ones off the project, is “Mary.” This upbeat, sun-kissed-sounding instrumental juxtaposes the rest of the melancholic-sounding songs off of the album, and appropriately so. He talks about his relationship with marijuana and his usage as he personifies the drug as a woman with desirable physical characteristics. “Mary” is someone that he proclaims to want to spend all his time with. But eventually, as he spends more and more time with “Mary,” he sees “her” as nothing but a path to indifference and stagnancy.
The final, and 16th track of the album, “16 Mirrors,” is a short yet bitter-sweet conclusion to the album. It leaves the listener with a culmination of all the personal issues and fears Alex speaks about throughout this project. He’s conflicted about bridging the gap between him and an old friend he had grown apart from, whether that was due to his own doings or an outside force. Throughout the song, background voices sing out about “16 mirrors,” as they metaphorically entrap him within his own mind, forced into self-reflection.
Alex G’s “Trick” is a beautiful project that leaves you with a different experience each time you give it a listen. The ability to dissect each track deeper and deeper with every listen I give to this album leaves me surprised each time. Alex G touches on a plethora of emotionally packed topics in a 37-minute period, speaking on his intimacy and fear of abandonment, existentialism and the ambiguous idea of “forever.”
Rating: 5/5
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