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Sep 09, 2019 Web Exclusive By Adam Turner-Heffer

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.

Over his previous two albums, Cameron has revealed himself as a master storyteller, with an extremely dark sense of humor, to explore themes of toxic masculinity in a subtle, performative way. Live or in his music videos, which tell an important part of Cameron’s down-and-out-loser character, he physically embodies the machismo displayed by men way out of their depth and times in the 21st century.

On his latest album, Miami Memory, however, Cameron has taken on a couple more voices to his repertoire, a direct result of his relationship with actress Jemima Kirke. Cameron’s third full-length sees him take on female perspectives to the toxic masculinity problem, such as on the brilliant “Far From Born Again,” his song celebrating empowered sex-workers. Alongside this, Cameron sings in the first-person for the first time, addressing Kirke’s children directly in opener “Stepdad” and then Kirke herself on the album’s sex-dripping title track.

Cameron still finds room to cover his more favored and comfortable subjects, however, through a new, specifically American lens. This is Cameron’s first album fully recorded in America, and as such he utilizes a range of sounds and genres reflecting that such as the brilliant “Bad For the Boys,” a bar-rock exposition on various awful men. Meanwhile closer “Too Far” sits just on the right side of cheese, because if there is a contemporary artist who can successfully balance cliche and thought-provoking pop music, it’s Cameron. (www.alkcm.bandcamp.com)

Author rating: 8/10