Back in December 2017, Shakey Graves proclaimed on his Twitter page, “Next album. New sound. Sell your suspenders.” The tweet was tongue-in-cheek, but Alejandro Rose-Garcia, the Austin native who’s been plying his trade as Shakey Graves since 2007, was making a dead-serious point about his latest album, Can’t Wake Up (Dualtone, out May 4). This ambitious, audacious work heralds an artistic metamorphosis for the 30-year-old veteran, whose risk-taking in painting outside the lines has been rewarded tenfold. “This record is the most I’ve ever intentionally worked on a project, musically speaking, in terms of the scope of it and how much thought went into it,” he says. “It’s a dense album; there’s a lot of information going on.”
That is not a hyperbolic boast. From one moment to the next, Can’t Wake Up veers from the inevitable to the revelatory, its thirteen songs teeming with jarring musical and thematic collisions and thrillingly seamless intersections, gnarly psychological hornswoggles and ecstatic resolutions. Central to the prevailing sense of disorientation are the lead vocals, none of which is purely solo. Instead, each lead performance is shadowed by a queasy harmony or slightly out-of-sync unison part, giving the sense—especially on headphones—that these voices are emanating from inside the listener’s head. In a sense, the album is a microcosm of Rose-Garcia obsessively artistic existence and its ever-expanding horizons.
—Bud Scoppa, January 2018
He will play St. Paul’s Palace Theatre on 9/29. Tickets are still available HERE
Tour Dates
SEP 19 Boston, MA House Of Blues Boston
SEP 20 Toronto, Canada RBC Echo Beach
SEP 22 New York, NY Terminal 5
SEP 24 Pittsburgh, PA Stage AE
SEP 25 Columbus, OH Newport Music Hall
SEP 26 Chicago, IL Riviera Theatre
SEP 28 Madison, WI The Sylvee
SEP 29 Saint Paul, MN Palace Theatre
SEP 30 St Louis, MO The Pageant
OCT 02 Louisville, KY Louisville Palace Theatre
OCT 03 Nashville, TN Ryman Auditorium
OCT 04 Atlanta, GA Tabernacle
OCT 07 Austin, TX Austin City Limits Music Festival
OCT 14 Austin, TX Austin City Limits Music Festival
