Rex Orange County - Who Cares? review: nobody can stop him now

With a 20,000-capacity gig on the horizon, and all these bright songs to boot, this 23-year-old is a force to be reckoned with
David Smyth11 March 2022

On the list of acts playing huge outdoor gigs in London this summer, Foo Fighters, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Lady Gaga are joined, surprisingly, by 23-year-old Alex O’Connor from Hampshire. As Rex Orange County, O’Connor has never had a single climb higher than 68 in the UK charts, and one of his three previous albums spent a solitary week in the top 10 in 2019. On the offchance you could sing one of his songs from memory it would probably be Loving is Easy, a smooth standalone single from 2017. By these older measures of pop success he’s middling at best, yet in August he’ll perform to a 20,000-strong crowd in Gunnersbury Park, not long after selling out American outdoor venues including Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the Hollywood Bowl.

It’s online, of course, where he’s in real demand, with a lightly toasted, half asleep voice and optimistic, charming sound that is well suited to Spotify playlists called things like Good Energy, Dopamine and Hug Ur Friends. Three of his songs are getting close to half a billion streams each. Being championed by the influential Californian rapper Tyler, the Creator, who plucked him from Soundcloud obscurity to appear on his Flower Boy album in 2017, has helped his US appeal too.

The pair reunite here, on Open a Window, competing to see who has the most languorous voice over a soulful, meandering bassline, rich strings and piano. Otherwise the sound is more uniform and coherent than O’Connor’s earlier work. The drifting introductions to Keep It Up and Worth It could kid the listener into thinking they’ve accidentally switched to a Bach special on Classic FM. There are fewer modern effects, and the organic instrumentation of One in a Million and the title track places him closer to piano men Billy Joel and Randy Newman than anyone more current.

The sounds are so soothing and the accompanying visuals so jolly (chaotic dalmations, a thumbs-up icon with a smiling face) that it’s easy to overlook how fretful he sounds in some of the lyrics. Open a Window includes a drawn out “F*** this.” On 7am he worries repeatedly, “What if I’m not cut out for this?” It’s a dialogue with himself that seems to end on a positive note. “I’ll stick around/We’ll do it somehow,” he proposes on the dramatic Shoot Me Down. “No one can stop me now.” On the evidence of these bright songs and the summer he has in store, that sounds about right.

(RCA)

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