Way Up In The Sky

POST :: 101 :: A review of Alex G's new Album . . . eventually.

For most of 2025 I’ve felt this directionless ‘FUCK YOU’ swirling in me like a zit that won’t pop. It’s getting bigger, this pus-pale mound with no easy head to squeeze. I wish I could build a mall over it, like Emeryville built a mall over the Ohlone Shell Mound burial site. Many such cases, many such curses, to be sure.

I manage to sigh ‘fuck me’. They feel like synonyms, ‘fuck you’ and ‘fuck me’ . . .

“Well fuck you, buddy.”

“Well fuck me, buddy.”

“Well fuck the Bay Street Shopping Mall, buddy.”

Simpler to just say ‘fuck’. Simpler still, to say nothing . . . but that says something too, something that comes off judgmental — silence, like a quiet vegan at Thanksgiving Dinner.

Or, just get the ‘FUCK’ out in one go. Scream it like a coast-to-coast drive, toss the F off Venice Beach Pier and the K off the Brooklyn Bridge, hoping they make their way to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, hoping a Goblin Shark eats them. I’d like to be a Goblin Shark in my next life, but lack the courage to live at that depth.

Courage, with a capital U and R in the middle, because U R in the middle, and U R staying there until U R dead. Or, with a U R A in the middle. A what? A next word, like a next breath or a next move. Like a shark, always moving through it. Dead if they stop moving through it. Matter cutting through liquid and air, high concentration through low concentration, wishing I was the air instead, wishing my atoms were too excited to hold together. I’m just another solid wishing it was air, wishing it was light. Melting my world down to words, like the iron down to machines to make plastics, then tossing the plastics. Every word, signal use — like every ocean wave only hits the shore that one time, but we got to keep calling them waves because no one is there at the beachhead being like, ‘Hi Jessica, hey Midori, yo Captain Squeeze looks like Tifa is hot on your tail’. I’d do it, but I don’t have the courage to live at that level of honest metaphor.

Just enough courage to breathe in and then just enough to breathe out, because U R A breather, that much I’ll be. It takes something to breathe — not courage, but motion. Courage is just another motion. Courage, another word for walking a life.

Vibe prediction: they will find more plastic in the Mariana Trench, they’ll find it in the belly of a Goblin Shark who keeps mistaking shopping bags for jellyfish. Words and plastic everywhere, even inside the Goblin Shark.

“Thank you for shopping with us.”

Inside the Goblin Shark.

Vibe prediction: it is too late to write about plastic — not because the problem is too far gone to remedy. It's just not the vibe, the meme-cycle is complete, been done to death — our plastic is a striation over the Earth, a thousand vibes deep.

“To want to Describe it is to want to force it into the old thinking.” — Vilém Flusser

A vibe is diminished by description. A vibe is a wildfire — to take it out of its burning field and douse it with words will change it irrevocably. Like those spooky quantum particles that change the moment you look at them — the Observer Effect. Such is a vibe.

A vibe in captivity is an industry plant. Some vibes are bred in captivity. Taylor Swift was bred in captivity. Swifty is a vibe that is not a vibe, like how lab-grown meat is not meat. But that is just semantics, the last and only debate. Guns gunfighting to the death.

Love ain't for the young anyhow
Something that you learn from fallin' down
Don't make me
Don't make me
Don't make me

This is the vibe of Alex G’s new album, Headlights.

The first track, “June Guitar,” holds the chorus above. The month of June, superimposed onto the seasons of life, is the time when the young exit Spring and start the long process of getting old.

Don’t make me. But time makes you.

Walking home from work at night listening to Headlights, I’m reminded of the end of my Spring. I’m reminded of being 15 and walking around the empty PM streets of the San Diego suburbs, listening to Radiohead’s album, Kid A again & again. I’d just discovered ennui. I hoped, with a novice youth’s holy hubris, that the right sad song in the right place at the right time would unveil a great secret, and I would never be sad again. I know better now, but the temptation is still there — the sad-songs-night-walk habit dies hard. I don’t even want it to die. It keeps me in contact with my 15-year-old self, like we are having a conversation across decades.

The track “Spinning” feels forged in Elliott’s Smithy. Full of familiar lover’s pleas that remind me again of why love ain't for the young . . .

Now I know that you lie 'cause I lie
But I could make it up to you
I could fake it 'til it's true
Baby, I could make it new

Just like something in a song
It's not over, it's not wrong

Alex G is meta-lamenting another lesson of time. Love is not a love song, but you can put your love story there anyway. Love is never over and you are never wrong, just as long as the song.

“Far and Wide” is 90s indie pastiche — Pavement-nasally and sentimental but aware of itself. Desperation has given up on profundity for the moment — on trying to pry things open with poetry.

Butterflies and boats
And secret letters
Little things that make me think
Of what we had together

I try to embrace the saccharine, annoyed that an earnest Hallmark card means more than a forced avant gardeness.

Growing up on sad songs has not given me the answer to a single secret. There probably aren’t answers, or I should take some of the more common answers and, for the sake of simplicity, believe them. For now, I am sad till I’m not till I am again. Over the years, I think I’ve better learned to discern the difference between delving into the cold questions of being, and fetishizing my own depression. I like being cold, I’m good at being cold, and because of that I tend to pretend there are not warm places in the world. This is what I try to remember now.

“Beam Me Up” is the track I tend to loop on a night walk.

I'm gonna put that football way up in the sky
Locker rooms and blushes
Life will pass you by
I'm gonna put that rocket way up in the sky
Missions or abductions
Beam me up inside
Beam me up inside

Choosing sadness has been a way to control it — ‘I don’t have depression . . . I chose it.’ Silly.

I might be lazy. It’s easier to be sad than happy — or so it seems to me — like how falling is easier than leaping, to be happy I seem to have to push against a force —-another type of gravity.

Beam me up. I’m tired of a planet where I have to learn things from falling down. What kid doesn’t look up at the sky and wish for some force to take them up to somewhere better, be them angels or aliens? When I was 8, I begged for the Millennium Falcon. At 22, I longed for the Buddha’s Pure Land. Now, after so much silence, I’ve turned to the cool fire of I feel eternal at the center my own being. I’m gonna that football way up in the sky.

I leave it on the field
I leave it on the field
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

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Thank you all for reading.

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Till next time, be well.

— Sean Jewell