Alex Cameron’s career trajectory has most certainly been a winding one, but the past five years have seen him explode from internet oddity to unlikely pop star and love balladeer. Emerging in the early 2010s, Cameron existed only in the form of a few obscure videos, perhaps the most notable of which is a live recording of him and “friend and business partner” Roy Molloy performing a song entitled ‘The Comeback’ on a sidewalk at South By Southwest. A five-year-old comment on said video says simply: “Alex Cameron. Remember it.” And they were right.
One of Cameron’s other first impressions is the music video for ‘Take Care of Business’, the closer track from his first album, Jumping the Shark. The album was once freely hosted on an obscure website made to look like a relic of the so-called “kilobyte age” of dial-up internet. There were simply HTML tables enumerating the members of Cameron’s “hot young band” and dictating, among other things, a list of rules for interviewing Cameron, which included a provision against asking him about his facial scarring, which was the result of makeup he’d apply to more fully immerse himself in his characters during the Jumping the Shark era.
From the very beginning, Cameron’s work has always found him in the shoes of the seediest characters one can imagine. ‘The Comeback’ follows a suicidal TV host who can’t handle losing his show to the passage of time; ‘Happy Ending’ unpacks a painfully self-unaware businessman who can’t divorce himself from his overseas infidelities. The artist’s second LP, Forced Witness, found him working in the same theme with a much different sound, trading the sparse synth lines of his debut for a fully-realized dream of soft rock. Lush instrumentals soundtrack Cameron’s delves into the intersection of the straight white male psyche, often alighting up the intersection of sexual deviance and the internet.
But Forced Witness also marked the intrusion of some honesty into Cameron’s work. ‘Stranger’s Kiss’, recorded as a duet with Angel Olsen, was released alongside a music video featuring Cameron and multidisciplinary artist Jemima Kirke. The veil between artist and narrator was thinner there than anywhere else in Cameron’s oeuvre, and it foreshadowed the artists’ third LP, 2019’s Miami Memory, which Cameron has billed as a love letter to Kirke, who has since become his romantic partner.
As Alex Cameron records go, Miami Memory is thematically his most varied work, but as it does for so many, falling in love has invigorated and elevated his writing. There’s still a healthy dose of darkly comedic character studies, as listeners will find in ‘Divorce’ and ‘Gaslight’, but the real treat is arguably Cameron’s nakedly romantic lyrics, like the over-the-top amorousness of the title track, or his spoken-word narration at the end of album closer ‘Too Far’.
Watching Cameron weave all these different threads together during his performance at Cambridge’s Sinclair club is a sight to behold. Backed by a five-piece band including Molloy on saxophone, dressed in a sleeveless vest that exposes a tattoo of “Miami” ensconced in a heart shape on his right shoulder, Cameron oozes a strange power, flexing and dancing differently with each song as he morphs between his honest self and his unsavory characters. During breaks he exchanges banter with each member of the band, no one moreso than his lifelong friend Roy Molloy. Molloy’s stage presence is cool and collected, often sitting pensively on his trademark wooden stool, one leg to the floor and one bent upwards to rest on the stool itself, sizing up the audience. Whereas in the Jumping the Shark age Molloy’s sax was a bit of an oddity, the past two records have found it integrated seamlessly, becoming a trademark of the Alex Cameron sound.
In the middle of the set, Cameron begins fabricating an origin story for Molloy, a tale of a man who lost a prized Google Reviews account for refusing to give out anything but a five-star rating. This segues into what has become a tradition of any set for the band: the Stool Review. Molloy spends a decent portion of the night on the stool, after all, so it’s only fair to assess its merits. The band settles in, Cameron taking a seat and everyone training their eyes squarely on Roy as he sizes up the wooden throne. After much talk, lifting, and even a sniff prompted by an audience member, the Sinclair-provided seat gets a solid four stars out of five, prompting cheers from the audience.
Playing to a packed house, it’s wild to hear the audience sing every word of songs old and new, and watch couples steal furtive glances at each other during the raunchiest lines of ‘Miami Memory’, which ought not to be spoiled here. The final song of the main set is ‘Far From Born Again’, which sees Cameron successfully inverting his formula. Instead of painting a portrait of a seedy man with a fractured relationship to sex, it spotlights a female sex worker whose unapologetic empowerment stands in stark contrast to the typical male. And for the encore, Cameron brings out perhaps his most effective portrayal of that male psyche yet, ‘Marlon Brando’. Cameron explains, “It’s okay to be confused,” but that said, confusion isn’t an excuse to treat people poorly, and encourages people to practice their discretion then and there by not singing along to the song, which contains offensive language designed to highlight the fragility of the character’s ego. And, for the most part, people oblige.
Across three albums, Alex Cameron has proven himself to be a multi-talented musician and writer, moving across genres and into a wider thematic space that not only skewers the macho male ego, but also finds him speaking honestly about love and life at large. He’s nothing if not a man willing to grow and change with the times.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
