7 Oct 2024
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Alexander Guy - Album Review: Last Call At The South Sea Hotel

24 Apr 2024 // A review by Daniel Jones

Wellingtonian singer-songwriter Alexander Guy releases his new album Last Call At The South Sea Hotel on April 18th. The first official studio album from Alexander Guy, who has previously released a live album Vogelmorn Bowling Club in 2023.

Last Call At The South Sea Hotel, recorded in Alice Krebs Lodge, in Wellington, NZ, "I tried recording with friends in a studio, but I quickly realised I needed to spend a lot of time by myself and in a nice environment to get takes I liked”. The ascetic of Last Call At The South Sea Hotel wouldn't be out of place in a Wes Anderson movie, as Alexander tells tales of icons, from New York to Paris, dreaming of a different life or maybe a different time.

Armed with just a vocal and nylon string guitar, Last Call At The South Sea Hotel, takes you on a folk (jazz) exploration and could be the soundtrack to Jack Kerouac's American 1957 novel On The Road. Alexander would fit right in, maybe in the corner of a bar playing his tracks Don Quixote or Modigliani.

Alexander claims, “The concept around the album is something like this: The South Sea Hotel is a real hotel that I worked at down on Rakiura (I spent a few months here in the bar and the cafe after university). I spent a lot of my adolescence and young adulthood depressed, in this sort of purgatorial no-mans-land that I couldn't seem to get out of. What saved me really was an exposure to art; through literature, painting and music I was able to see beyond the borders of my depression and slowly pull myself out of it. I found that I did not get much of an artistic education growing up, and I do think the arts in Aotearoa are in need of some tender loving care, European art was what I felt I could properly interact with. I see a very deep beauty in traditional Maori art, but as a pakeha I didn't feel like I could fully throw myself into that."

Fans of (early) libertines, Pete Doherty, Townes Van Zandt, Nick Drake even Donovan will be drawn to Alexanders poetic soul and ability to paint a picture, notably in Heaven's A Ghosttown, “smoking cigarettes under the marble arch, the poor buggers don’t know where to start’, captures a familiar moment.

Alexander is currently living in a little town a bit out of Athens and working on new projects, "I have two musical projects I am working on: one is another batch of new songs which I would like to record as another album sometime soon, and then I am experimenting with a long (30-40 minute) narrative song, based on a short story I wrote a while ago about a hunter in Southland and a deer-god, about the different ways the descendants of a colonising people, could respectfully integrate themselves into the culture and the land. I'm also just about to finish off a wee short film."

 

About Alexander Guy

Alexander Guy is a Wellington based songwriter, usually strumming away on a nylon-strung guitar and rambling on about some wandering knight or nice butterfly.




Visit the muzic.net.nz Profile for Alexander Guy

Releases

Last Call At The South Sea Hotel
Year: 2024
Type: Album

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