Alex Cameron has been inhabiting his absurd and tragic characters for over a decade now, a Grand Theft Auto-style carnivalesque of tawdry magicians, drunk preachers and sex workers, wallowing and thriving in the knowledge that it's just not gonna happen for them. While some of the types and tropes are starting to feel a bit recycled on his fifth full-length, Late to Set, it's always a pleasure to spend time in Cameron's funhouse world.
Indeed, his gift for insightful, often hilarious wordplay remains fresh. And if the need for a heavier edit is beginning to be felt, it's at least partly due to the arrangements — which, while meticulous and expertly crafted, often fail to elevate the material as much as they could. Once you accept its parameters, there are some real highlights to be found on this stripped-down album from the Australian artist.
When Cameron's tightly focused vision works here, it really does. The largely ambient "Jesus Never Had No Porno" is Late to Set's centrepiece, its gorgeous wide-open starriness and comet-like accents adding heartbreaking weight to Cameron's socio-cosmic musings, which start out silly but become unexpectedly profound. "No Guns Come Alone" is strong in this regard as well, a churchy crime ballad that ends with a weirdly affecting martial crescendo punctuated by chaotic yells and exclamations, like the credits rolling on some ghostly cop movie from the '70s.
Elsewhere, however, it's the more fleshed-out efforts that make the biggest impact, for better or worse. "Ricochet" is the most stylish number, for instance, a refreshing breeze of ethereal yacht rock full of smooth, sun-dappled guitar swells and bittersweet harmonica that will have you clamouring for more. A few more songs like this would have added some real juice to the record; at nine tracks, it's already a bit of a glass half-empty. Ironically, the hurried "Red Hook Rain" — the other more conventionally produced song here — feels oddly forced, like an Alex Cameron brand exercise.
And yet, much of Late to Set could have arguably benefited from some of its energy. The cinematic sweep of opener "No Soldier," the vaguely tropical bounce of "Statue Down," the barroom boogie of "Stand-In Man"; all are full of groove and rhythm, build and release, dynamics, and especially transitions, that go unserved here by the minimal drum programming and atmospherics on hand.
Cameron seems to have made the decision to step further and further away from giving his material a full-band treatment with every album since Forced Witness, his yet-to-be-surpassed breakthrough from 2017. While it's yielded a handful of great tracks on each LP since, it really feels like he struck gold and walked away from the seam sometimes.
Cameron's world and its denizens are as compelling as ever, though, and that's what makes him such a distinctive artist. Amateur gigolos, self-pitying alpha males and idealist strivers all get amusing perp walks. "I ordered a hooker to my home / And I yelled at my family," ("Testosterone in Blue") is as crisp and lucid as a haiku, and you can just picture the ring of bowed heads nodding along in a dingy community centre somewhere.
But in the Cam-verse, everyone's waiting for him to finish so they can pipe up with their own self-pitying monologue, and it's this mixture of the absurd and humane that the singer-songwriter captures so well: the seedy, dingier counterpart to Springsteen's noble blue-collar world. Not everything needs to give church-basement energy though, and some of these production choices feel like unnecessary method acting.
