by John Golden
Alexander Fatato’s fourth studio record teleports you to the times when you’ve felt most vulnerable, the times you can’t help but think back to when you’re at your highest high or your lowest low. His painfully relatable and nostalgic wordplay has you bumping into your memories and past-selves with each line of his honest lyrics. Sonically through the roof with songs like “Bare Minimum'' and stuck in the mud with “Slack,” there is a constant ebb and flow of feeling liberated and at the same time, trapped by the pressures, anxieties, and hardships of growing up and letting go. Fatato’s lyrical duality of the introspective and inquisitive has Alexander “questioning the composition of everything” and stressing what it means “to finally be certain of certainty” on his most recent release, Lucky Life.
With what sounds like a boot tumbling cyclically in a dryer, the opening track “White Knuckle'' fumbles your headspace for ten seconds with a mix of delicate sampling and percussion blended together. The somber bass line and chunky acoustic guitar join ten seconds later. Fatato sings the lyric “everybody’s too tired to talk” and John Carney’s keys graciously lead us into a chorus donning Slint-esque spoken-word painted throughout the abrasiveness of the wailing guitars and heavy hitting snare fills.
“Sticky,” the album’s second track starts as a waltzy indie rock tune that morphs into a slowed down, time signature bending breakdown that showcases Fatato’s guitar weaving and fingerpicking. At the end of the soft spoken outro, you can hardly make out what is being said, which makes the listener have to focus, maybe even skip back on the track to hear one of the most beautiful lyrics on the record, “survival mode is getting old, as I’m getting old”. “Back Porch” and “Consistency,” both rhythmically and sonically pleasing tracks, highlight the sparring and syncopated arrangements Alexander is adept at developing. Drummer Adam Berkowitz’s beat on “Consistency” is tastefully weaved in with Bradford Krieger’s high pitched, droning lead guitar notes to perfectly surround Fatato’s mathy guitar riff, making the downtempo song punch just as hard as if it was double the tempo and decibel level.
Eliza Neimi’s cello is introduced on the short-lived “Hunter,” helping Lucky Life break up the punchiness of the earlier tracks. Halfway through the album, the atmospheric and acoustic-heavy “Certainty” lightens up the feel until the slow and sweeping track ends, and right after a thundering drum fill begins on “Ribcage,” one of the most eclectic tracks on the record. A spoken word segment about denim legged guys, their habits, what their neighbors think of them, and how they don’t understand what it means to hold a pulsing rib cage in the early morning is sandwiched between abrasive, punchy guitar swells that are reminiscent of a cooing bird that just got its neck wrung.
This being Alexander’s fourth full length album at Big Nice Studio, working with producer and long-time collaborator Bradford Krieger, you can expect there to be a leap in recording and production quality but there is boundlessness in the way that Fatato blends genres and opens and closes doors to new and reminiscent sounds. One of Lucky Life’s singles, “Bare Minimum,” has him stressing his vocal cords, every coughed out line is warmly wrapped by Mijael Maratuech’s driving bass. Fatato quickly pivots to a whisper on the title track “Lucky Life,” a doubtful song that touches on alcoholism, apathy, and how “life is lucky and if you care you’ve won,” bringing the album’s title into interpretation.
“Wasted Case” comes in clearer than any of the tracks preceding it. With only Fatato singing and playing guitar to start the recording, it sounds like it could have been a one take wonder. No mixing, no added instrumentation until about forty seconds, a lo-fi kick, hat and snare fade in as well as a warbly synth pattern that gradually dunks the guitar and vocals underwater, drowning the entire track in a fuzzy warmth that fades out as quick as it faded in.
The closing track “Gutter Brain” ends on a hopeful note, as if a realization of the more apathetic, melancholic messages before were leading up to this mental breaking point. Talking of moving with intention, patience, and casting out complacency, the song acts as a mantra or note-to-self for Fatato. The man who whispered about being piss drunk and confused on a walk home two tracks before shakes hands with the man who is speaking this album’s poetic message: that life is lucky and every now and then, we have to clean the gutters that trap our tendencies to bullshit. The last line of the record, “Wake up, Alex. To know is not to practice” reassures him and the listener that while life is lucky, it is a gamble at best and to face it at all is well worth living.