In the year that’s gone by since the release of his last album, I think it goes without saying that Alex Lopez has grown a lot as a musician. Just listening to any excerpt from his latest record Nasty Crime gives off a sense of confidence in his performance that wasn’t nearly as present in his previous work, but the underlying self-control that has accompanied all of his music to date is very much intact. Without abandoning the aesthetical roots that gave way to some of his best work in the past, Lopez is tackling textural expressiveness via “Hooked,” “I Don’t Care,” and “World on Fire” like it’s his second nature, fusing the physical with the sonic to explore some of the more ambitious harmonies he’s put onto an LP thus far.
The punchiness of the instrumentation in this record is definitely a feature worth writing home about, and I would say this is for all of the right reasons. “Holy Woman” and “Just Wait” go so much further with us because of their imposing shape, and one is inclined to get even more out of their substance when listening to Nasty Crime as a complete piece rather than broken up into eleven different songs. The cohesiveness of this album is really something to applaud, especially when acknowledging just how little continuity seems to matter to a lot of the mainstream players who are competing with the likes of this singer/songwriter on the FM dial at the moment.
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Conceptually speaking, I hear a strong political narrative to the storytelling that Lopez is engaging in here, but I don’t know that I would call Nasty Crime a political album per se. There’s undeniably a reductiveness that is more common among folk-rock than it is anything in blues when it comes to “No Way” and “When the Sun Goes Down” that I would be lying if I said I was anticipating in this tracklist, but it nonetheless blends with the overall tone of the music perfectly. For what he’s trying to accomplish, I feel like this artist isn’t going too far off of the deep end with his creative whims here, even if they are taking him into a much broader territory than what some might have predicted him capable of experimenting with.
Nasty Crime is quite the rebellious look for Alex Lopez, but it isn’t necessarily one that we couldn’t have seen coming – particularly when studying the skill he’s been building his career off of since day one. This isn’t a player who wants to incorporate different aesthetical influences inside of a collage, but instead someone stacking concepts to make something wholly original, that’s his and his alone, which takes a wit that most artists just don’t have the ability to keep up with. I love the anti-status quo nature of Nasty Crime, but more importantly, I like what it says about the man responsible for creating it, as I don’t feel like he was getting the credit he deserved for his talents prior to this latest release.
Clay Burton