It might not be the Movie of the Week (that comes September 15), but Austin’s own Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, is shaking things up with his latest release nonetheless. The two-part single, featuring tracks “Playing Along” and “Big in the World,” dropped last Wednesday ( August 9) via Dualtone Records, adding to the momentum Rose-Garcia built with previous singles “Ready or Not” (featuring Sierra Ferrell) and “Evergreen.”
“Big in the World” opens promisingly, with a multilayered instrumental featuring strings and interesting synth action. Rose-Garcia’s voice comes in subdued, almost timidly, but it’s clear that this is a song rooted in its lyricism. There’s never too much happening sonically, allowing lines like “I thought sweetly of my sanity / And how it always gets away from me” to deliver like a gut punch.
“Playing Along” opens more subtly, taking its time to grow into its own over the course of five minutes. The Americana elements that Graves is known for are there, but more experimentally, sounding more precisely produced and closely executed than the previous singles. The vocal delivery has echoes of early Modest Mouse or alt-j, with expanded verses speaking to the current American atmosphere — “Stars and stripes, America strong / JK LOL we’re just playing along” ends one such section — before ending on a slick instrumental break.
Ostensibly, Movie of the Week stems from a project that Rose-Garcia undertook for a film. He left the project with a body of work “invigorated,” and immediately went to his band to record.
“I came up with the plot of an imaginary movie,” he says. “And we started to treat it like a soundtrack.”
In the conceptual soundtrack album that resulted, Rose-Garcia said that “Playing Along” is “the theme of our musical main character reaching maximum apathy in a small (minded) town.” Meanwhile, “Big in the World” came about “mid-2020 while asking myself what I wanted from my future and my present, as a person and a musician.”
Shakey Graves is currently on the road promoting the single, and will loop back around to Boston with a full album when he plays Roadrunner on November 14 with Rayland Baxter.