Alex Cameron is in ecstasy and anxiety on ‘Oxy Music’

Leering previous the sterility of up to date pop music, Alex Cameron’s beat-heavy ballads on Oxy Music drive listeners into rhythmic gyrations (that hopefully resemble dancing) as they ponder the raging opioid disaster. Within the midst of what was, for a lot of, an unprecedented interval of depressing solitude and ugly self-reflection, a slew of introspective albums littered the musicsphere. Cameron is a notable exception to this development. Whereas he pivoted into such self-analyses on his most up-to-date pre-pandemic album, Miami Reminiscence, his post-2020 debut noticed him returning to the caricature-driven writing of his earlier work.

Maybe I’m a morally poor feminist, however I discovered the fake poisonous masculinity that Cameron constructed his platform upon to be sheer genius. The pleasures of his first albums had been based on a saccharine sense of ethical superiority over the apparent evils of tradition. Cameron was making the joke, and also you, the listener, had been in on it. His songs take the views of outliers: the hypermasculine table-for-one man and the web porn obsessed. Now, he’s drug addled, confused, and determined for goal. Whereas the characters who dominate his songs have developed extra complexity with every album, what nonetheless stays is the Australian crooner’s shrewdness. His lyrics are indecent and irreverent: “I promise after I fall I’ll be swish / Solely room for one / Yeah there’s solely room for one in a Ok Gap.”

Oxy Music radiates with Cameron’s signature interaction between obtusity and authenticity. “If my music ever turns into, identical to, completely fucking sarcastic and meaningless, you’ll know that I’ve changed into an ungrateful prick,” he tells me between puffs from his vape from a plant-ridden room in Los Angeles.

The lyrics on Oxy Music are stuffed with “confessions and lies,” he explains. Cameron sees the perform of his work to be a sonic snapshot of historical past. “There could be somewhat ego concerned on this, and I attempt to reduce that as a lot as potential. However I’ve all the time simply thought, ‘I’m making an attempt to create an correct depiction of what it means to exist.’” The album explores the angle of a personality within the throes of substance abuse, impressed partly by Nico Walker’s novel Cherry, information tales, and real-life people Cameron has encountered. He’s drawn to factors of cultural rivalry—large-scale debates through which the general public is edged into taking one aspect or one other. However Cameron performs within the mess of grey between black-and-white, in search of the willingly-misunderstanding sorts who refuse to imagine in cultural change that expands past the fashionable youngsters’ Sophie’s alternative: “Simply say no and persecute those that say sure,” or, “Hurrah for unregulated drug use.” With Oxy Music’s darker thematics, Cameron masters the stability between satire and sympathy.