Courtesy of Orchid Tapes.

In all honesty, “Harvey‰” is not actually my favorite song from Alex G‰’s debut full-length album DSU. I‰’m drawn more to the disorienting, maze-like melodies found in “Icehead‰” and “Hollow.‰” But because I have an unwavering devotion to this recently emerged artist‰’s songwriting and want everyone to hear about him, I happily review “Harvey‰Û, the album’s crowd favorite. 

So what is it about this less-than-two-minute long song that so many people love? Myself once unsure, I remember drunkenly asking my musician friend this question when the album first came out this summer. His reply, “I dunno, it just sounds good,‰” was, in a way, all I really needed to understand. DSU is a mass of multi-layered electric and acoustic guitars, pitch-shifted vocals, and background keys that even I‰’ll admit is not necessarily easily digestible on first listen. But “Harvey‰” acts like a kind of beacon of light that stands out from the often murkier, noisier, and/or weirder tracks that surround it: a small but completed gem that exhibits a sophisticated and polished perfection of his ability to write incredible melodies that “just sound [fucking] good.‰Û

Indeed, the melodies on many songs on DSU kind of circle around in charming disarray, making “Harvey‰” unique in the way it gently keeps moving forward. This is largely thanks to the persistent strumming of an acoustic guitar: its constancy giving a stable direction to the wandering electric and vocal melodies, which, by the way, blend in a way that is totally sublime ‰ÛÒ a euphoric sound that feels like being high and triumphant in the sunlight.

The true magic, I think, to “Harvey‰” is how and where the song ends up. In the last fifty seconds, the steady drumbeat and bright electric guitar drop out and are replaced by an unfamiliar feminine “ooo‰” (maybe Alex‰’s voice pitch-shifted) and a distant piano; rendering the space quieter and darker than where we began. So while listening to “Harvey‰” gives us a clear sense of blissful forward movement, we still wind up in a part of Alex‰’s mind that is characteristically obscured ‰ÛÒ a place that is strange but never foreboding. This is the trick of “Harvey‰” that sneaks under everyone‰’s skin: it immediately grabs our basic human sentiments with some catchy melodies and then gently guides us into a mysterious place inside ourselves that we don‰’t want to leave.