God Save the Animals was co-produced and mixed by Jacob Portrait andfeatures the previously released tracks “Runner” - hailed as an “inarguably one of his best” by Pitchfork - and “Blessing,” which was praised by theNew York Timesas“eerie, hypnotic and, somehow, strangely moving.”
Alex G made his late night television debut last week, performing “Runner” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“People come and people go away / Yeah, but God with me he stayed,” sings Alex Giannascoli, the 29-year-old, Philadelphia-based musician best known as Alex G on his new album, God Save the Animals. “God” figures in the LP’s title and multiple of its thirteen tracks, not as a concrete religious entity but as a sign for a generalized sense of faith (in something, anything) that fortifies Giannascoli, or the characters he voices, amid the songs’ often fraught situations. Giannascoli has been drawn in recent years to musicians like Gillian Welch and writers like Joy Williams, artists who balance the public and hermetic and who present faith more as a shared social language than religious doctrine.
Filtering his experiences through fact and fiction, Giannascoli also opened up the songs through a more practical method: collaboration. God Save the Animals features several individual contributions from his bandmates (guitarist Samuel Acchione, drummer Tom Kelly, and bassist John Heywood) or frequent collaborator Molly Germer on strings and/or vocals. As with records since his adolescence, Giannascoli wrote and demoed the songs of God Save the Animals by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment” during the pandemic, he began visiting multiple studios in greater Philadelphia. God Save the Animals consequently features the work of some half-dozen engineers who were asked to help produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant. The result is an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette and its thoroughgoing complexity.
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