Lex Walton operates on the extremes of hope and despair; from the outside, it just seems like irony. She will reference cult director Vincent Gallo (as “Vinny Gallo”) and Owl City’s childlike 2009 hit “Fireflies” on the same EP. Her song titles, like “In This House, We Don’t Call the Cops; We Call Chosen Family” and “Preteen on Omegle Blues,” can be off-putting. Walton is prolific and, among a certain Brooklyn trans scene, ubiquitous—aside from appearing in lo-fi trans anthology series Castration Movie, she’s the bassist in Prairie Princess, and this summer, aided the band’s lead singer Emerson Borakove in staging Airy Foist at a Geese set. Her solo songs are anything from keyboard demos to 12-minute blown-out opuses. For Car Seat Headrest fans who remember Will Toledo’s pre-Matador days, the trajectory will be familiar, but Walton’s output is much more confrontational.
A lot of Walton’s music feels intentionally incomprehensible, whether you grew up on the internet and then moved to Brooklyn or not; it initially kept me, a New York-based trans person of Tumblr experience, at arm’s length with its hyperlexic musings. If ever a Bandcamp page needed a glossary, it would be Walton’s account. Yet when Walton surprise-released Ultimate Love Forever last week, I understood exactly what she was going for, specifically on the lyric, “Dressed in the uniform of the verbose/At the end of the world, so it goes.” Walton’s verbosity is armor against a world quite literally surveilling trans people’s every move; the terminally online lingo masks real grief. On her Sub Pop debut, the armor comes off, as Walton departs Bushwick interpersonal dynamics for wider societal ills. She puts her wordiness to good use, updating millennial optimism for an age of loneliness and bitterness.
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“Hipster Runoff” discusses the collapse of this idealism, as represented by Occupy Wall Street and Kony 2012, and by extension the failure of Gen Z to become the world’s saviors instead. (Not an easy task for anyone: Phil Collins, in the ’80s, promised “my generation will put it right,” and that definitely did not happen either.) On this song, Walton tries to recapture that early sense of possibility: Co-producing alongside Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, Walton endearingly shouts out his old band when she sings, “What do I know? I’ll believe in anything.” As ever, she’s referential, but with added resources she can afford to be surprisingly reverential, indulging in the chance to make a ’00s indie record: Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire contributes characteristically harmonic-laden strings to two songs, including the penultimate “Adrian Borland Will Have His Revenge on London.” Listen closely to that one, and you’ll hear triumphant “woah-ohs,” a battle cry of early 21st century sincerity buried in distortion.
The added production value uncovers the earnestness that was always there. Compare last year’s single version of “I Wish I Was an M80” to the album, and the final recording is much more dynamic. The vocals are louder, too, revealing that as much as she tries to hide it, Walton can put together a hook-driven indie rock song. Closer “Ultimate Love 4Ever” has an almost off-Broadway-style intro (“Why shouldn’t we all just kill ourselves? Isn’t there anything better out there?” “Uh… well, yeah! Let me tell you…”) and launches into a straightforward, purposefully naive rocker that reveals the core longing beneath all of the references and anger: “I want an island of everyone I’ve ever loved,” and “I’m so tired of crying/I’m so tired of being alone.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
