Alex Rex - Memory, Speak: Live at WOOLF II – A Terrascope Celebration (2021) Hi-Res

The good old fashioned live album seems to have fallen out of favour in recent years, a state of affairs obviously not helped by the recent lack of actual, real-life gigs. But Alex Rex – the current vehicle of songwriter/drummer/folk-rock renaissance man Alex Neilson – aren’t afraid to buck a trend or two. In the summer of 2019, when standing around in a field with a few hundred other people was still a perfectly normal (and often wonderful) thing to do, they played Woolf II – a mini-festival run by Phil McMullen (founder/editor of Ptolemaic Terrascope and Terrascope Online) in rural Wiltshire’s Cleeve House, a former residence of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf – and recorded the results.

The performance came at a creatively fecund period: the band had just released Otterburn, and third album Andromeda was just around the corner. Both of those records drew on ruptures in Neilson’s personal life – bereavement and separation feature as predominant lyrical themes – and many of the songs on Memory, Speak (an inversion of the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir) come from those two releases.

It kicks off with the a cappella Every Wall Is A Wailing Wall, a song which would later appear at the end of the fourth album Paradise (2021). In a live setting, it is a perfect opener – brief, arresting, instantly involving. A crunch of electric guitar and drums then introduces The Life Of A Wave, a song whose backing vocals channel the spirit of Bob Dylan’s wordless wonder Wigwam, before Neilson casts himself as half-crazed ringmaster, delivering one of his most powerful performances, part song, part incantation. Two songs in and it’s already a transformative experience.

It doesn’t let up from that point on. The mad melodic cascade of Haunted House drops off a cliff; hot on its heels is the irresistible Please God Make Me Good (But Not Yet), perhaps the greatest ever song about Saint Augustine and yep, that includes the Dylan one. Indeed, Dylan is a common and obvious comparison, but Neilson casts his net much wider than that in terms of influence and the results are accordingly stranger and more vivid (and would Dylan ever write about a former lover torturing him with a voodoo sex doll?)

Night Visiting Song is Neilson’s poignant update of a traditional Irish song. Here it rings with piano and a jangle of guitars that build from C86 whimsy to full-on Velvet Underground noisy minimalism before dropping out altogether, in one of the album’s most moving moments. The Leonard Cohen (or possibly Nick Cave)-inspired Master is another highlight beginning as a downbeat piano ballad before the skewed squawk of electric guitar takes over. ‘It’s really been a horror of a year’, sings Neilson, in a line that would have been intensely personal at the time but has since come to take on a more universal relevance.

Latest Regret gives full vent to Neilson’s visceral and wholly unique lyricism over taut, choppy guitars and a tight rhythm section. The musicians throughout the performance are on great form. Neilson, whose drumming often expresses experimental or interpretive tendencies, largely keeps to the rock band formula here, but he’s very good at that too, and Audrey Bizouerne’s bass is lithe and loping. Rory Haye’s guitar is versatile but always distinctive, one-minute searing and psychy, the next, gentle and pastoral. And Georgia Seddon’s keys give the sound a fullness and emotional depth. These elements all come together on the muscular slab of I Am Happy, a monstrous juggernaut of distorted gothic blues-rock with lyrics drenched in a personal, hellish kind of surrealism.

One of the joys of this album is getting to witness some of Neilson’s idiosyncratic count-ins. ‘One, two, wiggly-woo’ leads us into The Cruel Rule (think Blonde On Blonde meets Liege & Lief). But despite the humour, you’re never far away from an emotional kick in the teeth. This is understandable, given that most of the songs from Otterburn and a sprinkling of the Andromeda material deal with the death of Neilson’s brother. The stark, stripped-back waltz Coward’s Song is a particular heartbreaker.

But there are moments of redemption too, or partial redemption, not least in the final song, Pass The Mask (which also closes Andromeda). The coda of the song – and the album – ‘Nothing can heal or destroy you better than time’, speaks of the difficulties of coming to terms with loss but also admits that coming to terms is a possibility.

As songwriters go, nobody puts quite as much on the table as Neilson, and in a live setting, this could be something of a challenge for the listener – it’s probably meant to be a challenge – but such raw experiences are both valuable and, in this case, hugely rewarding. Memory, Speak is a moment in time, a document of Alex Rex at their most formidable and fragile.