Alex Ward – Hapless Days / 2005 Self / 10 Tracks / http://www.alexward.org / [email protected] / Reviewed 21 August 2005

Alex Ward plays a brand a music that is not easily categorizable. Sure, there are notes during tracks like “Speak Your Mind” that remind individuals of the spontaneity of Frank Zappa, but the pop-tinged strains of Alex’s vocals during the track are radically different in context than anything out on the market. The melodrama present on “Enemies” really brings Ward back into the constraints of poipular music. It is a challenge to delineate eir vocals during this track from Alice Coopers; the track honestly seems to be influenced in more than a passing way by the operatic rock of the aforementioned. After spinning eir wheels for the first few tracks, the dominant sound of “Hapless Days” really seems to be this re-vamp of the horror-rock pioneered by Alice Cooper and transferred to later bands like The Misfits.

Moving into a weird mixture of alt-rock (in the jangly guitars) and AC/DC like arrangement, “Showtime” really is at the cusp of being called a success. There are a few things that can be called “constants” throughout “Hapless Days”, but by far the most negative of these has to be the continual distortion that surrounds Alex’s vocals through a majority of the disc. This distortion is absent during the disc’s strongest foot forward, the Irish-influenced “Sounds Like Someone We Know”. “Sounds” is a smidgin over two minutes, and this sad fact is painfully noticed just as “Hapless Days” does a 180 and goes into the Jazz-influenced instrumental track “Theme From “Hapless Days””. Alex Ward really is able to capture the minds and spirits of eir listeners when eir experimentative spirit comes into play; when tracks like “Echoes” come on, it is not to a rousing round of claps but a tired sigh.

There is no doubt that Ward can come through and create something new and exciting at the drop of a hat, but listeners will wonder exactly why so many of the tracks on “Hapless Days” tend to go back to the same well. Hopefully the next time that listeners hear from Alex Ward, the artist will have made it a point to allow impulses to take over eir creative process – these brief forays into uncharted waters (such as tracks like “Sounds Like Someone We Know”) are what make the disc, and would be in the upper spectrums of tracks created in that genre (“Theme From “Hapless Days”). Some solid tracks, but a too-complacent Ward makes this disc unnecessarily suffer.

Top Tracks: Sounds Like Someone We Know, Theme From ‘Hapless Days’

Rating: 4.8/10