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.
