Late to Set is typical Alex Cameron fare, for better or worse

Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.

“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly synth slowly rising over the course of the song as Cameron takes swings at everyone around his flailing, failed POV. “No Soldier” threatens to explode into thunderous drums and righteous revenge but never does, only building tension over its entire runtime without resolve.

These are the situations and characters Cameron obsesses over. His debut Jumping the Shark was a full concept album about a washed-up actor, but he put his whole ass in it, wearing prosthetics for the album art and performances to inhabit the paunchy, pitiful failson he portrayed. Jumping the Shark was also wonderfully uncomfortable. Cameron is from Australia and, like fellow prankster Kirin J Callinan, fuses the sadsack narratives of Randy Newman or Harry Nilson with the acidic tone of Aussie national hero Gareth Liddiard. His best work, like 2017’s Forced Witness, balances between wallowing in the grossness of men and laughing at their failures, empathy and disgust coming in alternating waves.

Eighties pop glooper “Stand-in Man” starts with Cameron acting as a (literal) swaggering cock, the other man for a femme fatale—until he reveals he’s completely exhausted, unable to keep up with her appetite. “Chastity / You’ve got me screaming out for chastity / Please no more your majesty,” he howls in his best Robert Palmer impersonation. Cameron loves to build a strong façade only to tear the whole thing down, unveiling the weaknesses of every man he inhabits. Over a growing, blocky bass on “Testosterone in Blue,” he mixes alpha male mythology with woo-woo cosmology, impeccable harmonies touching the words as he sings, “I’m revving up like a Chevrolet.” It’s the sort of masculine astrology that Pete Hegseth surely loves and Cameron revels in the garish obnoxiousness of.

“Testosterone in Blue” hints that the second half of the album is surprisingly stark. There’s a lack of booming drums, Cameron preferring to rely on programmed percussion or the natural thump of a double bass. Plenty of the guitar and bass lines throughout Late to Set sound like they’re bouncing off PVC pipe, the thunking rhythm more important than the melodies. It’s both a compliment and detriment to the album. The lack of drums allows for a deeper focus on Cameron’s lyrics as he chews scenery (“Jesus never had no Big Mac / He had no coital shame / Never had 9/11 / Never even saw no plane”), but there are plenty of times during the album where a Phil Collins drum fill would make the songs fuller, more faithful descendants of the delicious pop hooks Cameron is parodying. There’s also the strange choice to not include last year’s supremely catchy single “Short King,” though its bluesy shuffle and generally happier vibe might have undercut the misery of Late to Set. 

The turn toward austerity also emphasizes that Cameron is still a captivating frontman. On “Jesus Never Had No Porno,” a natural evolution of Joel Olstine’s hyper-capitalist, jingoist perversion of Christianity, has Cameron muttering “Where is Jesus?” absent-mindedly like Christ himself owes him twenty bucks. “Red Hook Rain” is a tribute to another eighties hero, all simmering tension and John Carpenter basslines, sounding like a brilliantly dollar store version of Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain.” Cameron brings B-movie menace to the kidnapping tale of “No Guns Come Alone” and the chintzy spy noir “Ricochet,” both of which have him monologuing like a villain about to get one-linered to death by Schwarzenegger. Cameron’s best moment, though, comes from the worrying, deeply nihilistic closer “Violent Man”—a portrait of a man either in the thrall of toxic masculinity or using gender as an excuse to break everything around him. “I will do violence now,” he says simply, without emotion, the album’s most chilling moment. “You will be violent, too / Whether you clench your fists or not.”

Late to Set is tied together by terrible men doing terrible things and their desperate attempts to assuage guilt, but it’s also Alex Cameron’s the loosest album narrative yet. There’s half a framing device here: it’s easy to assume the failing actor on “No Soldier” is flicking through the filmography of his life, the mistakes and films that were made. But unlike Jumping the Shark or even his last album, Oxy Music, Late to Set eschews a larger arc (and the absence of Cameron’s longtime collaborator, saxophonist Roy Molloy, leaves a noticeable hole in these songs). There’s a sense that much of the album could be straight up pop hits, considering our never-ending eighties nostalgia, but Cameron purposefully undercuts himself or defaces the veneers he wears. Would it be better if the music was less cheeky? Maybe, but it would certainly be less him. If Tom Cruise gets an Oscar, he should give props to Late to Set. [Self-Released]

Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.

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