Alex Cameron
Miami Memory
Release Date: Sep 13, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Secretly Canadian
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Album Review: Miami Memory by Alex Cameron
Great, Based on 6 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Alex Cameron has been many people through his music: a studmuffin who preys upon underaged girls, an insecure homophobe, and a homeless man who has just woken up from a wet dream, among others. What makes these characters work is how he's mocking these terrible people while expressing empathy to how they became who they are. Because of that, there's something daunting about a sincere Alex Cameron record, but the lead single and title track off of his new album, Miami Memory, announces just that.
Based on rating 8/10
Over the past few years, there hasn't been an act, or more accurately, entertainer, such as Alex Cameron. He is a throwback to an older time where musicians or artists playing a persona was a familiar concept, an outlier in our current overly self-aware times. Musically, he exists as a more cynical Bruce Springsteen, brilliantly painting the worlds of these close-to-real-life characters and their awful excesses.
Based on rating 8/10
Fans of Alex Cameron's brilliant and perhaps controversial sophomore effort were surely wondering if lightning could strike twice with Miami Memory. Those who followed its promising string of pre-release singles might have been reaching for the nearest grounded conductor even. Rest assured that while perhaps not quite as consistently good as 2017's Forced Witness, the Sydney, Australia-born singer-songwriter's latest is nonetheless excellent, hilarious and bursting with even more broken and misunderstood men, some worthy of sympathy, others ….
Based on rating 8/10
Cameron's lurid lyrical kick does, however, appear in rude health, casually applying wry wit to sleek, comparatively dialled-down soft rock schmaltz; vignettes of outsiders scattered throughout, rendered with the endearingly louche, barbed humour which has proved a signature trait. Whereas Forced Witness reinforced the brash electro-pop precedent established with Jumping The Shark, this third LP indulges a sanitised adult contemporary gleam, despite raw, undiluted caricatures remaining a perennial feature. The title track, for instance, deals with intimacy in vividly blasé fashion: "Eating your ass like an oyster / The way you came like a tsunami".
Based on rating 7/10
Australian singer/songwriter Alex Cameron developed a persona of the same name over the course of several albums of dark, depraved narratives set to '80s-modeled synth pop. Listening closely to the raw tales Cameron spun in his songs was a wild ride. At times you could almost smell the cheap cologne as he sang about sleazy after-hours scenes, Internet romance, and the general bleakness and failures of his self-named character.
Based on rating 6.0/10
Edgy comedians like to say they're testing the waters. Alex Cameron wants you to come on in 'cause the water is fine. On his 2014 debut, Jumping the Shark, the Australian rocker masqueraded as an aging, washed-up musician. His 2017 album Forced Witness was a delightful and at times outright offensive journey to the center of the male psyche, full of sleazy, self-congratulatory exploits delivered with one eyebrow arched.
'Miami Memory'
is available now