Alex Cameron may hail from Australia, but across four albums he’s proven that he has his finger on the pulse of the American psyche; and his latest, the impeccably-named Oxy Music, finds that pulse getting dangerously slow under the influence of fentanyl. Mostly written from the perspective of one character, the subject of the album finds himself displaying an addictive personality across all spectrums of need, centered around his addiction to “blues”, pills that have made all-too-real grim headlines more and more as fentanyl, oxycodone, and other opioids have robbed people left and right of their wellbeing or even their lives, while manufacturers such as Purdue Pharma have worked to conceal the dangers of the drugs. On the album’s Bandcamp page, Cameron is quoted as saying that his narrator is: “Starved of meaningful purpose, confused about the state of the world, and in dire need of a reason to live.” And as he says in ‘Dead Eyes’, he’s a “skinny white boy with the broken wrists” – often the kind of thing that leads people to their first encounter with these dangerous chemicals.
Cameron and his friend, business partner, and saxophonist Roy Molloy are no strangers to the Boston area, having stopped here many times both with their full band as a duo. “We never need an excuse to come to Boston,” Cameron says early in the night, and despite it being a Tuesday, the crowd is wild. The band has spawned a very particular type of fandom based around its menagerie of personalities, including Cameron’s penchant for recording music videos in Speedos, and Molloy’s fixation on tower cranes. There’s a specific sub-fandom for the latter called the “Roy Squad”, and someone in the crowd shouts out to praise the way he “puts his lips on that thing” – the object in question being his saxophone. Cameron cracks a smile and quips, “It’s always in Boston…”
Rather than jump right into Oxy Music, Cameron begins the evening with a smattering of tracks from his first few records, including ‘Far from Born Again’ which spotlights a female sex worker using the trade as a way to wrest back control of her life, a stark contrast to the way Cameron’s male characters relate to sex, which typically as a shameful secret, played out on the internet, mired in infidelity. “Same men who tell her ‘stop’ are the same suckers that pay,” he notes, calling out the hypocrisy of men who yell for women to cover up even though their lack of interpersonal understanding often leads them to be some of the biggest consumers of this content to which they claim to object. After ‘Divorce’ comes a pair of twisted love songs, ‘Candy May’ and ‘Miami Memory’ – the former explores a toxic relationship marred by porn addiction and verbal abuse, the latter a much healthier but equally bizarre expression of intimacy with some truly choice similes baked in, accompanied by some Latin percussion courtesy of drummer Henri Lindström.
Following this duo is a pair of new tracks from Oxy Music. The first is the album’s lead single, ‘Sara Jo’, one of the few tracks that seem to stray just a bit from the concept of the record. It’s a more general exploration of the impotency and lack of agency people find themselves in through life – perhaps the precursor to opioid use – and questions the strange concepts people think are true about themselves, notions that ultimately turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. ‘Prescription Refill’ fast-forwards the timeline, finding Cameron’s character approaching a romantic relationship with the same desperation as he does drugs: “just wait til I get my hands on you”. Co-written with bassist Justin Nijssen, their harmonizing calls back excellently to that sort of mid-80s vibe Cameron has come to cultivate in his three most recent records.
Cameron takes a pause between tracks to thank the audience for coming to the show. He thinks of the band’s chosen career: “It’s not the shiniest of lives, but it’s something we enjoy,” and the big smiles on the faces of the band throughout the night are ample evidence to that effect. He notes the oddly-shaped mezzanine that snakes around much of The Sinclair and says, “Thanks for making this concert four-dimensional” with a laugh. Sipping his lager, he observes that it’s “warm – and delicious”, and naturally a voice from the crowd chimes in with a “You’re warm and delicious!” Kneeling to place his cup back onto the floor, he sums up the vibe in the room succinctly: “This is like the comments section”.
After that it’s back to some of his strongest older material, sharing vocal duties with keyboardist Jess Parsons on ‘Stranger’s Kiss’, originally a duet with Angel Olsen, whom many years prior brought Cameron and Molloy to this very room as a support act in one of their first tours of the USA. Like the best Al Cam tracks, it’s alive with strange imagery and finds its most reassuring refrain by spinning the metaphor of digging oneself into a hole into something unexpectedly triumphant. That vibe is what Cameron is best at: exploring sadness or outright depravity but basically never letting that exploration, that anthropological perspective, turn to a level of scorn. There’s a reason Cameron often writes these songs from the first-person point of view even as he critiques these personalities: in it all is the desire to understand, not to excuse but to explore. Even the toxic lead in ‘Marlon Brando’ is aware that he’s in the wrong – he’s simply powerless against his conditioning to change. At the nexus of bravado, addiction, and nothingness, that’s where one will find Alex Cameron. As the final song of the night goes, “there’s only room for one in a K-hole” – but Cameron wants to know what lies within.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
