Courtesy of Orchid Tapes.

DSU is poison in disguise.

In chemistry courses, you are taught the dose is what matters. So after listening to this record more times than any other album in my entire life, the concern is not that I don‰’t know what to feel about it, it‰’s that I am numb. So here‰’s a look at WVAU‰’s #1 weekly chart spot holder champion, our #5 album of the year, and personally the most influential album for me of 2014. Why do we keep on coming back for more?

For Philadelphia native Alex Giannascoli, making music is old news. Check out his Bandcamp page and you will find nearly a dozen releases. Each contains distinct and brilliant bedroom recordings kept in place by idiosyncratic lyrics, ideal indie melodies and a rabid fan base. Giannascoli‰’s songwriting provides an imaginative yet honest way to cope with reality. Animals are personified and situations retold are relatable. Anything else separates into a spectrum of storytelling, anywhere between blunt observations and exhibitions of insecurity: “I look at you and feel the same / can you forgive me for that pain?‰Û (“Sorry‰Û). But what makes DSU so potent still remains a mystery. Perhaps it is the wave-like tension within each song and the album as a whole; high tides of feedback crashed between calm simmers of melancholy hums. Or maybe it is just something that ferments and matures over time.

At first, Alex G‰’s sound may seem like a splatter of instruments that haven‰’t quite fully come together. But get to know this album and you will realize that this very scatter is how his songs should make you feel. Your shoulders will sway to the sweet shivers of “Rejoyce‰” and “Skipper‰” while your soul will dance a bit to the drum groove in “Promise‰” and the fractured guitar sounds of “Black Hair.‰” Everything just seems so familiar; songs you have been craving for too long. 

Cliche but true, just like life, Giannascoli‰’s music is beautifully unkempt. Instrumentation-wise, heartbreaking melodies are limbs exposed, knobby knees, a crack in the window, a girl‰’s messy hair. Meanwhile, what‰’s incredible about Alex G’s lyrics is that they put into words what we often cannot ‰ÛÒ that other humans are perhaps the greatest root of our sadness; you realize this when you‰’re home alone talking to your dog, the only creature who truly seems to understand you.

What makes DSU so special is they way it understands your self-diagnosed and self-induced minor insanity. When music like this comes into your existence, you wonder if the artist actually comprehends how much it means to listeners. For Giannascoli, this awareness was quite possibly already embedded into his craft from the beginning: each song is sung, not with a single voice, but in harmony with a faint echo of seemingly infinite voices. Noticing this took admittedly too long. It was all there, right from the start, right from the very first Alex G show, singing along to the album in the car home with good friends ‰ÛÒ blissfully unaware we‰’re really all singing the same sad song.