Can you name a singer-songwriter-musician who earned cult status from six self-recorded and largely self-released albums, went on to gain widespread rock-journo praise and has just covered Shania Twain?
If you guessed (Sandy) Alex G, take a bow.
The Philadelphian born Alexander Giannascoli plays La Santa in Santa Ana on Saturday in support of his latest album House of Sugar on Domino Records, the home to Blood Orange, Cat Power and Arctic Monkeys.
Before Alex signed with Domino in 2015, his DIY LPs were passed around like secret missives by a growing fan base. That soon spilled into the rock journo world, where a FADER cover story labeled him a “once-in-a-generation talent” while Rolling Stone called him “an indie rock prodigy.”
House of Sugar, which was released on Sept. 13, is something of a sonic snake pit, with sounds slithering and layering atop one against lyrics that turn out to be mini-character studies. In naming the recording its Album of the Week, Stereogum called it a “collection of exquisite hauntings…Giannascoli’s most cinematic work yet,” while NPR hailed it has a top 10 album of the month by noting it’s “at times earnest and intimate, at others freaky and experimental; most often and most impressively, all of the above at once.”
Check out “Gretel”:
And “Hope”:
And, most of all, his totally different take on Twain’s “You’re Still The One” for SiriusXMU:
(Sandy) Alex G at La Santa, 220 E. 3rd St., Santa Ana, (657) 231-6005; lasantaoc.com. Sat., 8 p.m. $23.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.