MUSIC: This American blues man is Shakey in his Graves

BACK in December 2017, Shakey Graves proclaimed on his Twitter page, ‘Next album. New sound. Sell your suspenders.’

The tweet was tongue-in-cheek, but Alejandro Rose-Garcia, the Austin native who’s been plying his trade as Shakey Graves since 2007, was making a dead-serious point about his latest album, Can’t Wake Up’.

This ambitious, audacious work heralds an artistic metamorphosis for the 30-year-old veter-an, whose risk-taking in painting outside the lines has been rewarded tenfold.

“This record is the most I’ve ever intentionally worked on a project, musically speaking, in terms of the scope of it and how much thought went into it,” he says. “It’s a dense album; there’s a lot of information going on.”

Central to the prevailing sense of disorientation are the lead vocals, none of which are purely solo. Instead, each lead performance is shadowed by a queasy, lightly out-of-sync style.

In a sense, the album is a microcosm of Rose-Garcia’s obsessively artistic existence and his ever-expanding horizons.

Catch him in Vicar Street on November 16.