Alex Cameron
Oxy Music
SECRETLY CANADIAN
Two years ago, Alex Cameron found himself watching New York City shut down around him due to COVID: “The only people you saw when you went out were the junkies,” he noted. He spent his time observing them and himself closely, and if you take a little from column A and a little from column B, you get Cameron’s fourth LP, Oxy Music.
His previous release, 2019’s Miami Memory, was an anomaly that found Cameron unironically domesticated (in his own way, of course), swapping his usual synth-heavy sound for one more influenced by heartland rock. On Oxy Music, the synths are back, along with Cameron taking a backseat to let his characters, uh, shine. Like 2017’s Forced Witness and 2014’s Jumping the Shark before it, Oxy Music remains preoccupied with the internet, this time through the lens of addiction and mental health. The album kicks off magnificently with “Best Life”: “There’s nothing like the feeling / Of when you do a thing” (the short shelf life of that opener is excusable thanks to Cameron’s delivery). Other songs have titles like “K Hole” and “Prescription Refill.” “Hold the Line” has Cameron’s narrator meeting up with someone named “Eddy Pills.”
Also true to its title, the album is reminiscent of Avalon-era Roxy Music in places (with the great Roy Molloy as Andy Mackay on sax). “Breakdown” is truly sublime yacht rock, with Cameron asking, “If I have a breakdown, will you break up with me?” The personnel is top tier on Oxy Music, and it’s hard to believe that something so cohesive was put together by musicians on different continents, at times, due to the pandemic.
Cameron is at his best when he’s not overtly trying to push the envelope. Oxy Music features a couple of eyebrow-raisers similar to his use of the F-word (not “fuck”) on the Forced Witness track “Marlon Brando.” There’s a bigger conversation to be had about the layers here (which is what Cameron wants), but in short, it feels increasingly like he’s making his way through a list of no-no words simply because he can. This distracts from the fact that Cameron remains one of the better lyricists out there. The album ends with the whiplash of its title track, featuring Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson duetting with Cameron about riding a fentanyl wave: “I need a mirror and some lingerie / And get the fuck out of my way.” The pilled-out kitchen dance party quickly goes left, as they’re wont to do: “No one ever gets that one and done / Habit’s gonna weigh a ton.”
Oxy Music is brilliant soft-rock satire as only Cameron can do it, with the truth of each joke masquerading as parody. The unsettling part this time around is that, after the abject horror of the past couple of years, we’re able to see ourselves in it. Take this line, from “K Hole”: “Sorry, little girl, but my plate’s full / Trying to prove to you that I’m stable.” Or “Sara Jo,” with its chorus that sticks with you immediately: “Who pulled the curtains / Who broke the screen / Who told my brother that his kids are gonna die from this vaccine?” This is where Alex Cameron the human being shows his hand, and he needs these moments to make Oxy Music work—and it does, exquisitely.
