In a time of buttoned-down, procedural rock records, Alex Hirsch is still admirably working toward one of those old-school Grand Statements that defies category.
Hirsch, whose dad is television and Broadway star Judd Hirsch of “Taxi” fame, brilliantly races through musical subgenres – and personas – on Naturally. That makes for an album that’s simultaneously brash and vulnerable.
Hirsch lets somebody else make the classifications, though, preferring to remain somewhere between.
“What’s it to you?” he sings at one point, simultaneously asking the question and challenging the listener.
Hirsch, it seems, is not so much searching for a sound, for a definition, as he is mixing and matching them in a Cuisinart-y jumble of half-remembered popular music references.
Hirsch is both a traditional balladeer (“Naturally”) and ’70s fusion funkster (“Structure”). He’s as deft with the stinging put-down (“I Speak the Truth”) as he is the spacy, anthematic love song (“Nova”). He’ll toss off a hippified peace-prayer like “5755,” then make room for post-modern reggae in the instrumental “Stef’s Introduction.”
“How you see me,” Hirsch insists in the title song, “is how I see myself.”
And maybe that’s the point.
Any more, the epoch-defining, big-idea record can seem like a lost art. That what’s so ingratiating about the New York City native’s efforts to formulate his own unique statement, grand or not.
Even when it doesn’t work. “One Confession,” for instance, sounds too similar to the compressed, corporate acts that once stomped around like shaggy, Spandexed insects at football stadiums. His gritty tribute to John Lennon lacks a certain empathy for the still-raw memory of his brutal murder on a hometown street corner.
Often when Hirsch stumbles, however, it’s only because he’s aspiring to so much. “Martian Advance,” the album’s extended opener, tries with only partial success at blending the grinding guitar style of mid-period Police with a classic-rock grandiosity of spirit.
Still, failing to connect every time doesn’t diminish the broader impact of Naturally, produced by Bionik (who has previously worked with Ice-T, Smashing Pumpkins, R. Kelly and the Winans, among others). Together with Hirsch’s regular working band, Imprasia, they have fashioned something both ambitious and audacious, despite an occasional misstep. “The Day,” brooding and contemplative, makes a brave attempt at unraveling the mysteries of this life, and the one after. The Pink Floyd-inspired “Time and Space,” as the title implies, moves across a wide sky of psychedelic improvisation.
The album’s center point is “Christine,” a love-gone-wrong song presented both in keyboard-driven dreamscape with his band, and then again later alone at the piano. Nowhere is Hirsch’s flinty creativity better underscored.
Having run into a long-lost former girlfriend, Hirsch emerges from the conversation in a landscape of cerulean loneliness. He never knew what he had. A chorus straight of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” follows, then “Christine” finishes with this angelic wash of keyboards – until Hirsch, perfectly sensing the over-seriousness of the moment, adds a light-hearted scat at the end.
A dress rehearsal for the same song, honest and rough, actually outdoes the original. Hirsch opens with a cough and a snicker, copping to the Duran Duran reference. Then, belying those slouchingly lowered expectations, he begins building a delicate new version of “Christine” that sounds less like sad lament and more like a wounded plea for love. It’s a triumph.
Hirsch, for all his playful tinkering, puts on many hats but he never disguises true emotion. Taking a risk like that is rock music’s basic promise, a grand statement that’s still being made.
It’s Alex Hirsch’s promise, too.
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