This nice Jewish lad has created an album of futuristic dancehall and sci-fi soul with the help of the Major Lazer massive
Hometown: London.
The lineup: Alex Clare (vocals, music).
The background: Who or what is Alex Clare? We don't mean necessarily that he's created some hitherto unheard-of hybrid of extreme genres, but for some reason he has reduced us to silence when all we really want to do is tell you what he's like. The fact is, we're struggling today, and it's not a meteorological thing, it's a pigeonhole thing. There's one song that sounds like reggae metal ? meggae? rettle? ? and another comprising four notes repeated over a buzzing, wobbling bass note. Which isn't all that unusual. It's just that Alex Clare isn't being trumpeted by his record company as a new dubstep artist; no, we were told we had to write about him because he's this amazing new soul-blues man. Huh?!
Things we knew about Alex Clare before we decided to phone him for assistance: he's from Golders Green, 25 years old, and apparently "handsome as bejaysus" (his PR's Irish). He's also a chef, not in a Raekwon sense but in a Galloping Gourmet sense, and he's made a cool video for his debut Island single, Up All Night, featuring a dishevelled man with a beard and a bikini-clad girl vomiting by a swimming pool. Things we found out after we rang him: he's a nice Jewish boy from south-west London now living in north-west London, his debut album has been produced by Diplo and Switch ? which explains the pulverising basslines and bursts of metallic noise ? oh, and that woman isn't vomiting, he corrects us, she's coughing up water. "It's about sleepwalking," says Clare, one of the few male artists to appear in this column with not one but two female Christian names, although we're not sure how handy this will be for his career. "It's about people waking up in a strange place and not realising how they got there. Has this ever happened to me? I've dabbled in insomnia, but not somnambulism."
We're glad to hear it. We're also glad to hear that Diplo and Switch produced his album because it might otherwise have gone down a tired-and-tested white-soul-man-with-cod-reggae-inflections route singing trad loverman blues in a routinely impressive voice like any number of troubadours before him. With D&S on board, the songs aren't smooth, they feature unexpected surges and jut out at impossible angles. It's soul reshaped in the studio, mangled by the Major Lazer massive. "They really know how to make a bassline sound crunchy and nice," says Clare, or maybe we'll call him Alex this time, assessing the impact of his debut single's explosive futuristic dancehall, with its bassline reminiscent of the one from the Jam's Eton Rifles, only backwards, and tweaked almost beyond recognition. He describes his debut album as having "quite a moody sound, with a lot of live instrumentation ? there's guitar, basslines, even sampled live drums backed up with 808s and electronic beats. I hate the word 'fusion' cos it's fucking wank, but it is a real mix." He's looking forward to 2011, but he has no idea what Island has in store for him. Are they selling him as a sci-fi soulman, a 21st-century Otis? "I wish," he says. "If they said that I'd hang up my boots." There's another thing we learned from our phone interview with Alex Clare. He wears boots.
The buzz: "The Major Lazer cronies put some serious Major Lazerness on Alex Clare's windswept vocals: beefy Nirvana-style guitars with a hint of surf, thin sirens and a little bit of dembow in the beat" ? Thefader.com.
The truth: It's future soul-reggae-blues, as sweaty as it is shiny.
Most likely to: Emit grunting sounds over crunchy basslines.
Least likely to: Vomit by a swimming pool.
What to buy: Up All Night is released by Island on 10 January.
File next to: Coco Sumner, Roachford, Mishka, Diplo and Switch.
Links: myspace.com/alexclare.
Monday's new band: Giant Steps.
Erika Christensen Emilie de Ravin Tara Reed Avril Lavigne Bridget Moynahan
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