Shakey Graves – Can’t Wake Up (Dualtone)

You know you need to take a second look at your musical choices when you finally give in to ‘the Tonight chorus’ – a soaring hand-on-heart chorus beginning with the word “Toniiiiight”. It is one of popular musics’ strongest signifiers of blandness, and it’s exactly what we get on Counting Sheep, the opening track of Shakey Graves’ new album Can’t Wake Up. It opens with a slow spacey groove before the dreaded moment of arrival – “Toniiiiiight/I got nothing on my mind but you”. It’s an unfortunate signifier of what’s to follow.

Shakey Graves is the moniker of Austin musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia. Garcia initially became recognised for his one-man-band approach and lo-fi folk recordings that made up most of his debut bandcamp album Roll The Bones, a charming collection of old weird Americana. Since then he’s been adding backing musicians and producing increasingly ‘tightened-up’ studio recordings. While some have worked, Can’t Wake Up, his third full-length, unfortunately completes the journey into indie-pop blandness that was begun tentatively on 2014’s still-just-passable And The War Came.

Following the opener Counting Sheep, we get the YouTube-ad pop-rock of energetic single Kids These Days, complete with synths perfectly tailored to 10-second holiday-ad videos.

If ‘Tonight’ is the number one type of chorus to avoid, then “la la la”s are the second, and they’re exactly what we get in copious amounts as the chorus of My Neighbor.

Lyrically, Garcia attempts to convey the life lessons accumulated in his 30 years as seriously as possible, with the results ranging from merely forgettable all the way to punishable moments like “I guess I’d rather burn than fade” and the chorus of Dining Alone – “I wonder what it’s like to fly a plane/meet a girl on Friday night and wake up next to her on Saturday.” The vocals also often fall into the same patterns of melody and phrasing throughout the thirteen tracks.

After eight fairly forgettable slices of pop-rock, Aibohphobia is a welcome and sudden change in pace, a throwback to the messy lo-fi country harmonies of his earlier work. Here though it’s exaggerated to a twee kind of redneck farm-advert jingle, which then transitions randomly back to the album’s default indie-rock mode. However, this country-influenced style is still a better match for Garcia’s voice than, say, the painful moody synth-pop of Big Bad Wolf or the over-the-top grandiosity of Excuses.

Right towards the end though, there are some worthwhile moments. The penultimate track Foot Of Your Bed is a strange dreamy slow-groove with some colourful string and harp parts. Then the album closes with the lazy summery swing of Tin Man, complete with Roll The Bones-esque old-timey harmonies. Garcia sounds stylistically at home on this last piece in a way he doesn’t anywhere else on the album, resulting in its strongest song by a mile. These closing tracks, crammed in at the end, prove that Shakey Graves still has something, but whatever that something is, it’s sadly missed on most of Can’t Wake Up.

Ruben Mita

Can’t Wake Up is due out on May 04.

Album Tracklist

• Counting Sheep
• Kids These Days
• Climb On The Cross (Ft. Rayland Baxter)
• Dining Alone (Ft. Rayland Baxter)
• My Neighbor
• Excuses
• Cops and Robbers
• Mansion Door (Ft. Rayland Baxter)
• Aibohphobia
• Big Bad Wolf
• Backseat Driver
• Foot of Your Bed
• Tin Man