Alex Tedesco - Pretty Lies

(Self released, 2012)

This review has been a long time coming.  And it's significant, in that it marks a change for Forest Gospel.  I plan no longer to provide reviews (or what I have previously passed off as reviews) for the music I post here.  Otherwise, I think, I would just never get around to posting anything (case in point: the last three months).  Just the way it is these days.  And anyways, if I'm posting it, that means it's recommended.  Just like everything else on here--make sense?

This, however, this record by Alex Tedesco, has been like a sledge hammer to the head.  One of the most anticipated albums of the year for me, absolutely (proof).  And while it certainly delivers, it also certainly messed me up (which is synonymous with delivering, obviously).  Tedesco has evolved from his debut, Future Strains (skronky, wild-eyed noise pop), into something that is heavier, darker, prettier, and much more complex.  Like the middleground between David Thomas Broughton and late-era Scott Walker,  Pretty Lies is rough-edged, drugged, carnal, and looking for blood (+, +, +, +).  Its audacious, really.  And listening to it has turned me upside-down.  If the internet age is really something that you can say and have it mean anything at all, know that Pretty Lies is not an album meant for the internet age.  Pretty Lies is an album meant to be digested, meant to swim between the ears, meant to haunt and haunt and haunt, meant to confuse and torment, anger and then elate, and, in the end, unqualifiedly injure (it is only a record, after all).  In the simplest terms its just some outsider pop album with a dump truck's worth of ambition and a baritone croon.  Give it some time, change your life.