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(Sony)Alex O’Connor has a knack for melody, but his unrelenting self-absorption leaves the resulting songs feeling flat and thinIt takes exactly 31 seconds from the start of his third album for Alex O’Connor to inform listeners that he’s feeling both stressed and “so depressed”. Those familiar with O’Connor’s oeuvre as Rex Orange County might suggest that’s very much par for the course. Feeling stressed and depressed is O’Connor’s thing. He’s stressed and depressed about girls, about his friendships, about his burgeoning musical career and, on a song called 7am, about forgetting to shut the blinds before he went to bed. He even has a weird habit of sounding upset when he’s ostensibly hymning a blossoming new romance, striking an oddly pleading tone: “I can’t believe you’ve come and saved me.”Even by the standards of sensitive “sad boi” singer-songwriters – none of them exactly big on impenetrable imagery and extended metaphors – O’Connor writes about his feelings in a curiously direct and unadorned way. Set to simple piano accompaniments that are often noticeably perkier than their subject matter, his lyrics frequently resemble too-much-information social media posts arranged into rhyming couplets and verses. (“So you want to be happy too? / What are you supposed to do?” he sings on Who Cares?’s title track.) In his back catalogue lurks a song about feeling stressed out called Stressed Out. He also has a song about feeling timid called Never Had the Balls and a song about being sad called A Song About Being Sad. By contrast, Ed Sheeran looks like Mark E Smith. Continue reading...