As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. House of Sugar is full of little instrumental parts and mumbled background vocals that come through and fall away without necessarily building or resolving, like students in a school pageant. Mixer Jacob Portrait, who’s worked on Alex G albums since 2015’s Beach Music, brings out professional-quality fidelity without clearing the cloudy textures. “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak,” Alex croons over the barn-dance sway of “Southern Sky.” These are songs about feeling discomfort in the gaze of others, vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. The title refers to both the SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia and the gingerbread house from “Hansel and Gretel.” Like a fairy tale, the album is both sweet and sinister, layering different modes to obscure its true intentions. It employs most all of the things that make Alex G songs sound like Alex G songs: sturdy, ragged chord progressions abstract, existential-leaning lyrics Molly Germer’s homey violin playing squeaky, pitch-shifted vocals like the voices you’d give your own bad ideas. His third album for Domino, House of Sugar, is the clearest and most inviting articulation of his skewed aesthetic.
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