It takes precisely 31 seconds from the beginning of his third album for Alex O’Connor to tell listeners that he’s feeling each careworn and “so depressed”. These accustomed to O’Connor’s oeuvre as Rex Orange County may counsel that’s very a lot par for the course. Feeling careworn and depressed is O’Connor’s factor. He’s careworn and depressed about women, about his friendships, about his burgeoning musical profession and, on a music known as 7am, about forgetting to close the blinds earlier than he went to mattress. He even has a bizarre behavior of sounding upset when he’s ostensibly hymning a blossoming new romance, hanging an oddly pleading tone: “I can’t consider you’ve come and saved me.”
Even by the requirements of delicate “unhappy boi” singer-songwriters – none of them precisely massive on impenetrable imagery and prolonged metaphors – O’Connor writes about his emotions in a curiously direct and unadorned manner. Set to easy piano accompaniments which can be typically noticeably perkier than their subject material, his lyrics often resemble too-much-information social media posts organized into rhyming couplets and verses. (“So that you need to be completely satisfied too? / What are you presupposed to do?” he sings on Who Cares?’s title observe.) In his again catalogue lurks a music about feeling stressed known as Careworn Out. He additionally has a music about feeling timid known as By no means Had the Balls and a music about being unhappy known as A Track About Being Unhappy. Against this, Ed Sheeran seems to be like Mark E Smith.
This, one suspects, is the key of Rex Orange County’s appreciable success: his again catalogue is thick with singles which have gone gold or platinum with out truly making the charts, a discombobulating phenomenon that signifies an terrible lot of streams unfold over a protracted time frame. As has been established completely lately, what a whole lot of teen and tween listeners now need from pop is relatability, they usually come no extra relatable than O’Connor together with his boy-next-door picture, his unvarnished diary-entry lyrics and his frequent options that stardom is all a bit a lot and he’d be happier residing a extra regular life: “I’m not lower out for this and I hold eager to name it quits,” he sings on 7am. If you need a sign of the age group his music attracts, he’s about to launch an expanded “anniversary” version of his album Apricot Princess, celebrating not its twentieth birthday, and even its tenth, however its fifth. Snort if you'd like on the thought of mistily recalling the halcyon period of 2017, however for a large chunk of his viewers, 5 years in the past most likely does appear to be the distant previous – a time when the older ones have been nonetheless finding out for his or her GCSEs and the youthful ones have been nonetheless at main college – and a less complicated one at that.
Musically, there’s a touch of classic soul music about his method on Who Cares?: the squelchy synth bass on Open a Window might have stepped off an early 80s R&B hit. There may be within the building of Shoot Me Down a barely perceptible trace of Oasis in ballad mode, particularly Cease Crying Your Coronary heart Out. However together with his tasteful string preparations, his electrical piano and his mid-Atlantic accent – “I’m alone witchoo,” he cries, as folks from Hampshire villages so typically do – what O’Connor actually recollects is the poppier finish of 70s mushy rock: Andrew Gold, Leo Sayer, Dean Friedman. For all of the 2020s sheen, the samples and the visitor look from Tyler, the Creator (O’Connor guested on his album Flower Boy within the halcyon period of 2017), it doesn’t take an enormous leap of creativeness to image him singing most of Who Cares? on Prime of the Pops, perched at a keyboard in a cheesecloth shirt, earlier than an viewers ready patiently for Showaddywaddy to come back on and liven issues up.
Like his soft-rock forebears, at his greatest O’Connor appears to be a part of a lineage of pop craftsmen for whom melody trumps every part – you don’t want edge, experimentation or lyrical fireworks if you happen to can provide you with a tune as robust as Open the Window or as cute as Making Time. However at his worst, it sounds limp and insubstantial, compounded by the skinny manufacturing (a sonic hyperlink to the times when O’Connor was importing his bedroom-recorded songs to Soundcloud) and his voice, which may are likely to the nasal and whiny. The impact is commonly oddly flattening: “I stored opening my door simply to see if you happen to would stroll by,” he sings on The Shade, sounding much less like a person briefly rendered irrational by love than somebody ready for a Deliveroo.
It’s music so redolent of the present urge for food for secure pop, and of a particular viewers, that you simply surprise what the longer term holds for O’Connor. Maybe he’ll develop and develop alongside his followers. Maybe he’ll come good on one in every of his many threats to pack all of it in. Proper now, although, he’s engaged in giving folks precisely what they need. If success actually makes him as sad as he retains claiming it does, he’s clearly going to be careworn and depressed for the foreseeable future: extra unvarnished grist to the songwriting mill.
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