Alejandro

BIOGRAPHY

Alejandro

¡Con Gusto!

On ¡Con Gusto!, the debut album from Brooklyn indie pop band Alejandro, people are always on the verge of finding or losing each other. A pair of best friends travel abroad at the dawn of adulthood, not realizing that the trip will mark the end of their brotherly bond. One small-town layabout reminisces about another who’s decided to set out in search of a bigger life. An awkward early stab at romance contains within it the story of a whole relationship to come. A son reflects on his last moments with his father, wondering why he couldn’t be more present while it was still possible.

“A lot of the record is me trying to conjure and hold on to these memories that I wasn’t able to form at the time, because I was stressed out or in a weird place,” says singer and songwriter Alex Silva. From that initial impulse to record a moment begins a process of refining, of burnishing and rearranging the lived details until they reveal wider emotional truths—and, in that way, remain alive in the minds of their listeners. As Silva sings in “Road,” a propulsive account of a creative partnership gone bad, streaked with iridescent synth leads and powered by a motorik rhythm section: “Only art survives/The rest is stolen by the past.”

Silva draws from a broad swath of inspiration: the diaristic directness of Sun Kil Moon and the elliptical narratives of Blood on the Tracks; the theatrical exuberance and subtle harmonic colorations of Prefab Sprout and Scott Walker; the sneaky sophistication of Third Eye Blind, whose songs, Silva points out, are a lot more musically and emotionally complex than their status as ’90s radio chestnuts would have you believe. His own songs are full of tricky rhythms, jazzy chord changes, unreliable narrators, and lyrics that pull the rug out from beneath your assumptions. But ¡Con Gusto! is never ostentatiously elaborate. Most of the time, it’s downright breezy, disguising its compositional ambition and the melancholy or acerbic shades of its writing in musical settings that evoke the beachside locales where several of its stories unfold.

Silva began writing the songs that would become ¡Con Gusto! in 2022, while his previous band, the math-rock-inflected Personal Space (Tiny Engines), was dissolving. Newly in need of an outlet, he found himself reaching toward a more direct and intuitive songwriting mode, starting from the simplest musical ideas, and allowing whatever associations they brought out for him to guide the songs’ development. “Picking up on the feeling of a piece of music and opening yourself to it, letting it trigger things in you—that’s a skill in itself. That isn’t always how I’ve written, but it’s how I write now,” he says.

Where he might have previously spent time honing every player’s instrumental lines, this time he focused on the core songwriting and his casually expressive singing, trusting his collaborators to fill out the frameworks he’d constructed. They were easy musicians to trust: drummer Jesse Chevan; bassist and keyboardist Charlie Hack; guitarist Ryan El-Solh (Scree, Office Culture); pedal steel player Luke Bergman (Bill Frissell, Andrew Bird); cornetist Mike Irwin (The Walkmen, Elvis Perkins); and saxophonist Ivan Arteaga. Many of these musicians, fixtures of a Brooklyn scene at the nexus of jazz and indie rock, have worked together in other configurations before, and their conversational interplay lends itself to ¡Con Gusto!’s languid and easygoing atmosphere.

Chevan and Hack, with whom Silva has collaborated in various bands for over a decade, are as essential to Alejandro as he is: the former’s deep pockets and athletic syncopations lending thrilling kinetic energy to even the ballads; the latter providing worlds of rich texture and color, whether the loping upright bass of “Townie,” the scorching organ of “Prague,” or the aqueous synths of “Road.” Bergman and El-Solh give sultry accents on the bossa-nova-flavored “Party of One, Pt. 2,” one of a diptych of songs about a sleazy divorcee on the prowl. (Now would be a good time to mention that Steely Dan is also an important reference point.) “Cool Friend,” the irrepressible opening track, ends on an angular and dissonant but strangely pleasing horn line from Irwin and Arteaga, painting in sound the song’s story of an old friendship’s slow fizzling, and the narrator’s nonchalance about it.

Much like memories themselves, Silva’s songs on ¡Con Gusto! are conveyed via vivid but flickering impressions of particular places, colors, scenes: a glass of water by a bedside, an old man on the side of the road, a backpack full of weed and booze, the blackness of a road stretching ahead. These images, somehow, form the emotional centers of his fragmentary stories, their feelings clear and potent even when the associated narrative remains just out of your grasp. Each song has a musical signature that helps to convey the sense of it as tied to a particular place or time: maybe it’s just the way the bass drum falls at the beginning of each verse, or the urgency of Silva’s strummed acoustic guitar. “Songs are like tattoos,” another of Silva’s major influences once famously sang, and his are like that too. The people and places might fade; the ink might, too. But through the music, something fleeting and precious lives on.