In the middle of his set in Toronto on Saturday night, Alex Giannascoli, who performs under the name Alex G, began to croon the opening lines of Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home." "I got my eyes on you," Giannascoli sang, stalking across the stage, "You're everything that I see." He strutted and whispered — suddenly keeling over, breaking out into a scream — before getting back to that Drake song.
In the crowd below him, there was no shared sense of how to react. Many laughed, some cheered. A few phones raised into the air, recording. Giannasocli just peered out towards the audience in flashes — daring you to get him, to figure out what he meant.
It was a fitting and familiar performance for the 29-year-old artist, who released his latest album, God Save the Animals, earlier this year. Over the course of nine LPs, Giannascoli has become known — amongst his acolytes, revered — for his equally opaque and intimate songs, ones that branch out endless decision trees of possible meaning. (Case in point: an Alex G song I used to get over heartbreak was listened to on repeat by a friend in her early days of new relationship.) It's a quality that has led fans to scribble out all sorts of theories about his songs. Are all his albums secretly about dogs? Or maybe he's singing from the perspectives of different animals? They're questions that have generated endless Reddit threads and debates dedicated to parsing his songs, and that pulled a full audience to Saturday's sold-out show.
The crowd tightened like magnets when Giannascoli arrived on stage, as the lights came up on an illustrated backdrop of birds in a barren tree, taken from the album art of God Save the Animals. On that album, Giannascoli's voice came into its most distinct focus yet. Where his words were blown out on earlier albums, almost ungraspable in the mix — part of the mystery of his meaning — they were suddenly at the surface, tactile. It still wasn't clear what he meant, precisely, but at least you knew what he was saying.
This transparency was on full display during Saturday's show, where Giannascoli's voice — whispering, keeling, shouting — was right up at the front. He offered phrase after phrase, and the crowd grabbed onto them on the other end. On show highlight "Runner," Giannascoli sang, "I have done a couple bad things," and his confession was shouted back at him, multiplied by the hundreds.
From the middle of the tightly packed crowd, Giannascoli — accompanied by guitarist Samuel Acchione, drummer Tom Kelly and bassist John Heywood — read as a kinetic, improvisational performer. With one leg held forward in a soft lunge, leaning back and forth, he was all bottled energy, like a runner eager to get racing. Between songs, few words were offered. When they were, they came as a set of slim phrases he repeated verbatim, as if playing each one off a recorded tape. "Thanks a lot," he said five times. "We've got two more songs for you," he promised twice. (The second time, he meant it.)
The songs Giannascoli selected were wide-ranging, spanning longtime favourites and instrumental interludes, reaching from God Save the Animals to his lo-fi beginnings nearly a decade ago. Giannascoli and his band slid between these tracks with ease and economy, barely stopping for breath in between.
Hearing his songs like this, collected in a single night, certain words surfaced again and again. I lost track of how many times he shouted a lyric about being good or being bad, or which one he mentioned more. ("I did good, I stayed out of the kitchen," "I have done a couple bad things," "You know good music makes me want to do bad things.") Giannascoli, or his characters, are constantly caught in these alternating moral calculations — always forever good, until they are always forever bad. Below him, the crowd repeated these oscillations in step with him, even as Giannasocli dismissed the idea that his songs offer up any kind of absolution on the other end. "Ain't gonna right your wrong," he sang firmly on "Mission," "with this stupid love song."
When Giannascoli walked off stage at the end of the set and "Life Is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane began to play over the PA, the fans knew the routine. Shouts and cheers came from the crowd, calling for his return for an encore. But Giannascoli wasn't interested in committing to the standard plays of audience fake-out. Of course that wasn't really his last song — and before "Life Is a Highway" had finished, he was back on stage, singing along. Picking up his guitar, he asked the crowd to hold up song requests on their phones. Groups joined together in advocating for certain tracks and, as Giannascoli picked from the raised screens, shouts of excitement increased at every favourite — each person eager to hear the one, to find in it a mirror to themselves.
But beyond that pull to interpret his lyrical intent — to pin it down in a fixed, personal sense — a more unplaceable and shared form of meaning finally emerged on Saturday night. Playing "Forgive," the closing track on God Save the Animals, the original fade-out that concludes the recorded version was transformed into a teeming instrumental climax. Huge fissures of guitar and drums broke over the stage as Giannascoli turned his back to the crowd, his expression obscured. No one could tell what he was feeling, or what, if anything, he was saying. He leaned back as the noise towered above, the crowd moving behind him in a moment of pure sound. "No stories, no mirrors," he had sung a few seconds earlier, before he'd turned his back. "I choose today."
In the crowd below him, there was no shared sense of how to react. Many laughed, some cheered. A few phones raised into the air, recording. Giannasocli just peered out towards the audience in flashes — daring you to get him, to figure out what he meant.
It was a fitting and familiar performance for the 29-year-old artist, who released his latest album, God Save the Animals, earlier this year. Over the course of nine LPs, Giannascoli has become known — amongst his acolytes, revered — for his equally opaque and intimate songs, ones that branch out endless decision trees of possible meaning. (Case in point: an Alex G song I used to get over heartbreak was listened to on repeat by a friend in her early days of new relationship.) It's a quality that has led fans to scribble out all sorts of theories about his songs. Are all his albums secretly about dogs? Or maybe he's singing from the perspectives of different animals? They're questions that have generated endless Reddit threads and debates dedicated to parsing his songs, and that pulled a full audience to Saturday's sold-out show.
The crowd tightened like magnets when Giannascoli arrived on stage, as the lights came up on an illustrated backdrop of birds in a barren tree, taken from the album art of God Save the Animals. On that album, Giannascoli's voice came into its most distinct focus yet. Where his words were blown out on earlier albums, almost ungraspable in the mix — part of the mystery of his meaning — they were suddenly at the surface, tactile. It still wasn't clear what he meant, precisely, but at least you knew what he was saying.
This transparency was on full display during Saturday's show, where Giannascoli's voice — whispering, keeling, shouting — was right up at the front. He offered phrase after phrase, and the crowd grabbed onto them on the other end. On show highlight "Runner," Giannascoli sang, "I have done a couple bad things," and his confession was shouted back at him, multiplied by the hundreds.
From the middle of the tightly packed crowd, Giannascoli — accompanied by guitarist Samuel Acchione, drummer Tom Kelly and bassist John Heywood — read as a kinetic, improvisational performer. With one leg held forward in a soft lunge, leaning back and forth, he was all bottled energy, like a runner eager to get racing. Between songs, few words were offered. When they were, they came as a set of slim phrases he repeated verbatim, as if playing each one off a recorded tape. "Thanks a lot," he said five times. "We've got two more songs for you," he promised twice. (The second time, he meant it.)
The songs Giannascoli selected were wide-ranging, spanning longtime favourites and instrumental interludes, reaching from God Save the Animals to his lo-fi beginnings nearly a decade ago. Giannascoli and his band slid between these tracks with ease and economy, barely stopping for breath in between.
Hearing his songs like this, collected in a single night, certain words surfaced again and again. I lost track of how many times he shouted a lyric about being good or being bad, or which one he mentioned more. ("I did good, I stayed out of the kitchen," "I have done a couple bad things," "You know good music makes me want to do bad things.") Giannascoli, or his characters, are constantly caught in these alternating moral calculations — always forever good, until they are always forever bad. Below him, the crowd repeated these oscillations in step with him, even as Giannasocli dismissed the idea that his songs offer up any kind of absolution on the other end. "Ain't gonna right your wrong," he sang firmly on "Mission," "with this stupid love song."
When Giannascoli walked off stage at the end of the set and "Life Is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane began to play over the PA, the fans knew the routine. Shouts and cheers came from the crowd, calling for his return for an encore. But Giannascoli wasn't interested in committing to the standard plays of audience fake-out. Of course that wasn't really his last song — and before "Life Is a Highway" had finished, he was back on stage, singing along. Picking up his guitar, he asked the crowd to hold up song requests on their phones. Groups joined together in advocating for certain tracks and, as Giannascoli picked from the raised screens, shouts of excitement increased at every favourite — each person eager to hear the one, to find in it a mirror to themselves.
But beyond that pull to interpret his lyrical intent — to pin it down in a fixed, personal sense — a more unplaceable and shared form of meaning finally emerged on Saturday night. Playing "Forgive," the closing track on God Save the Animals, the original fade-out that concludes the recorded version was transformed into a teeming instrumental climax. Huge fissures of guitar and drums broke over the stage as Giannascoli turned his back to the crowd, his expression obscured. No one could tell what he was feeling, or what, if anything, he was saying. He leaned back as the noise towered above, the crowd moving behind him in a moment of pure sound. "No stories, no mirrors," he had sung a few seconds earlier, before he'd turned his back. "I choose today."
