Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
It was a surprise to discover that Alex Rex has only once before appeared in this august journal, with the single ‘Wastwater’ in April 2022.
I’ve seen Alex Neilson play live on several occasions. A couple of times with the now sadly disbanded Trembling Bells (although I note that band’s keyboardist and lead vocalist Lavinia Blackwall, who has been ploughing a solo furrow, seems to have come back within his orbit) and a couple of times as Alex Rex, the most recent one being in Manchester, the weekend before Boris intoned “you must stay at home” and I remember spending half the gig trying to avoid getting close to his keyboardist on that night, who had clearly gone down with the lurgy.
I haven’t seen him since, what with being tied up with the Nordic scene, and that’s a shame because he and whatever his band is at the time always dispense oodles of energy and purpose and display great technical proficiency. And he can drum a bit, too.
(In the past I’ve seen direct comparisons made between Trembling Bells and Fairport Convention and between Lavinia and Sandy Denny but I hesitate to concur. They were better).
And that’s why I’m glad to see he’s still going strong, releasing a single, ‘Psychic Rome’, this week, on an obscure independent Scottish label, the Barne Society, which seems to fit the profile of a cottage industry microenterprise.
That seems to fit his character pretty well as a sort of DIY guy, collaborating with random musicians here and abroad on whatever project he or they are currently working on, the antithesis of the latter day pop star signed to a Universal brand for a six album deal on the strength of a single TikTok video recorded in their bedroom’s en suite toilet that got a few hits.
He’s Leeds born and raised, latterly settled in Glasgow but I always felt he’d fit in well with the UK’s most fascinating community, in Hebden Bridge, where everyone seems to be a self-help advocate.
Enough of the preamble already. What about the music?
Well, for ‘Psychic Rome’ he’s working with Lavinia again, on keys, also with Rory Haye (whom I’m sure has worked with Trembling Bells in the past?) and with Marco Rea on bass, a skilled songwriter in his own right.
You can always feel certain that Alex will come up with an erudite composition but never one that will go completely over everyone’s head. And even if it is in danger of doing that it won’t because you’ll be severely distracted by the way he and they smash it.
And so with ‘Psychic Rome’, which he introduces as “a glimpse into his interest in the corridor of time around the birth of Christ when the Roman Empire was at its most glorious and depraved. As Ted Hughes (a Poet Laureate and another native of Greater Hebden Bridge I might add) writes in his introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, ‘For all its Augustan stability, it was a sea of hysteria and despair. At one extreme wallowing in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence. ‘It also has a gnarly riff.”
Haye, Rea and Rex (sounds like a firm of solicitors) between them lay down a supremely powerful riff while Blackwall could be playing that piano to save her life on pain of being thrown to the lions if Caesar, Biggus Dickus and the rest are displeased.
I’m not sure that the lyrics collectively mean anything. I often think with Alex Rex that every line of lyric is an individual statement or invitation to examine a particular train of thought and they don’t have to have any reference to each other. Like Einstein trying to understand the origin of the universe from multiple starting points.
In this instance it’s as if he’d interviewed a variety of people from that era, taken some soundbites, put himself in it in a Beatles-like reference to his own death, and cobbled them all up into a BBC2 documentary, leaving you to figure it all out.
The video by the way comes courtesy of Tom Chick, with whom he has worked in the past, and is as surreal as the song.
As for Psychic Rome, now that Oldham’s last nightclub has closed down at least I’ll know where to go to party hard and skip the light fandango.
Ever since I first heard Trembling Bells (vaguely, through a distant radio playing a Marc Riley show on 6Music) I’ve always ranked Alex Nielson as one of the most creative musicians we’ve got. As I often say with Nordic musicians and bands I don’t get how he isn’t better known.
Find him on:
Bandcamp: https://alexrex.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexrexband
