Review - The World is Mine (I Don't Know Anything)

I think a lot of people will look at this and think ‘What?’ Okay, crash course in Alex Day. He’s this guy on YouTube called nerimon, or Alex, or ‘Hey you from London, yeah you, singing boy reading Twilight.’ Alex is part of a generation of Super Nerds. I mean that in the nice way. Super Nerds are awesome.

Okay, so Alex plays music. You with me so far? He plays music on YouTube. Okay, I know what you’re thinking – lots of people do that. Except, and here’s the fun part, these two Super Nerds, Alan Lastufka and Hank Green, set up a record company called DFTBA Records, and they signed Alex and many other cool people. This is Alex’s second album with them, The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything). So, now that you have the crash course in Alex Day and how he came to be on my blog, let’s begin!

What’s so special about this album?

In short? I think it’s how it came about. And the songs are ridiculously catchy, especially Georgia, The Time of Your Life and the title track The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything). And many others... or all of them. And, like Elbow, Alex Day sings with his own accent. He tried, before, to sing in the sort of American-commercial way, but he didn’t like it. He could do it, but he chose not to.

What’s it most like?

I would say his first album, but that’s not true. He did what Muse and many other bands do and created a new type of sound for his next album than what his listeners were used to. However, there’s common ground between this and his first album, Parrot Stories – the songs are pretty much all about love. Bless. He doesn’t claim for the idea of singing about girls to be original, but I like how he does it. Sort of a melancholy in some songs, but an enormous amount of energy in others (like Georgia).

Is this album really recommended?

If you can get past the fact that it’s not a commercial act, that it’s not made in the same way commercial albums are, and therefore doesn’t have the same sort of sound as commercial albums by much better known bands, then yes, this album is recommended. But if you have an attitude about music that restricts the growth of indie artists (not Indie the genre, but indie as in without a massive company behind them), then you may not be able to see The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything) as an album worth your time, because you’ll have attached a distaste to it before you’ve given it a shot. In short: your prejudice will get the better of you.

If you can get past your prejudices about certain types of music, then you will like this album. You’ll at least like it. As in, you might not love it like I do. But that’s okay, if you give it a shot first. I can almost promise you’ll find something you like on the album. Almost. I have to take into account that different people have different tastes. This is what Alex Day calls his “dance” album – really it’s called that because it has a lot of electrically produced sounds in it, it’s generally fast and it’s very much the sort of album you want to move about to. It’s a fun album to listen to, and I never get sick of it.

What next, then?

Well, Alex Day has another album and an EP that I’ve listened to a number of times, and he’s in two bands – Chameleon Circuit and Sons of Admirals, whose work I’ll be reviewing soon, too. Watch this space, because the DFTBA artists need backing to help them keep doing what they do best.