Alexander Lucas - 2022 - ST 2xLP

 

Subliminal Sounds – SUB-140-2LP

Alexander Lucas is not an album recorded in 2022 so much as a life the band never received permission to place on an album while it was happening. These twenty-two tracks collect the surviving evidence of a Nacka group active from 1969 to 1976, when Swedish heavy rock was still being invented in youth halls, rehearsal rooms and overdriven amplifiers rather than recognized as a historical movement. Only the self-financed 1973 single “Speed” backed with “Svarta Skogen” escaped at the time. Everything else remained scattered until this double LP allowed the group’s changing lineups, ambitions and rough recording circumstances to occupy one long physical object. The variations in fidelity are therefore not flaws requiring correction. They are changes in weather across seven years of a band repeatedly trying to make itself audible.

“Svarta Skogen” is the ideal opening because its forest is already darker and heavier than its two-and-a-half-minute running time suggests. Guitar, bass and drums move as a compact unit, with the riff carrying the blunt authority later associated with proto-metal while retaining the looseness of psychedelic hard rock. “Speed” pushes the same trio toward motion, its title functioning as both subject and command. Neither side sounds like musicians consciously designing a future genre. They sound like young players discovering that blues-based rock could be made harder, faster and less polite simply by increasing the pressure. Claes Alexander von Post’s guitar does not decorate the songs after their foundations are established. It acts as the foundation, rhythm engine and source of electrical instability at once, while Hans Olof Ekström and Benna Sörman prevent the recordings from becoming guitar demonstrations by keeping the whole machine bodily and immediate.

The surrounding material reveals that the single captured only one angle. “Race to Heaven,” “What Have You Done” and “You’re Gonna Die” compress dread, bravado and youthful mortality into direct hard-rock forms, while “Blow Auto” and the band’s quick attack on “Johnny B. Goode” show how closely early heavy music remained tied to old rock and roll. Their Chuck Berry cover is particularly revealing because it removes any illusion that heaviness arrived from nowhere. The original vocabulary is still visible, but Alexander Lucas drives it with louder amplification, heavier drums and the impatience of musicians whose audience expected the room to move. A second “Race to Heaven” and another version of “Speed” are not redundant archival padding. They show songs remaining unsettled, changing as the band’s personnel, equipment and understanding of its own force changed.

The second half stretches farther from the concise violence of the single. “Set Me Free,” “Poor Boy,” “Feel Me” and “Rape Me” allow riffs to remain active for five, six or nearly eight minutes, opening space for guitar leads, tempo changes and heavier psychedelic drift. “Poor Boy,” drawn from Stan Webb’s writing, connects Alexander Lucas to the British blues-rock language feeding so many European bands, yet the group’s version belongs to a colder and rougher social environment. “Feel Me” is especially important because duration becomes a tool rather than an indulgence. The band can stay inside a groove long enough for repetition to alter its emotional weight, shifting from swagger toward compulsion without requiring studio polish or elaborate progressive-rock architecture.

By “The Saint,” “Miss Angel,” “Coming Beside” and “Free to Ride,” the collection feels less like a single lost masterpiece than an accelerated history of one group attempting several possible futures. There are traces of blues rock, biker menace, psychedelia, early metal, boogie and the cleaner hard-rock songwriting that would become common later in the decade. The shifting sound prevents the familiar archival fantasy in which an obscure band is presented as perfectly formed and unfairly ignored. Alexander Lucas was formed, broken apart and formed again in public, through an extreme number of gigs and whatever recording opportunities became available. That incompleteness makes the music human. We hear ability developing alongside uncertainty, fashion changing around the players, and youthful confidence repeatedly outrunning the resources needed to preserve it properly.

The rare single may have provided the doorway through which this history was finally recovered, but the unreleased recordings make the doorway lead somewhere. They restore the band not as the owners of one expensive collector’s object but as working musicians who mattered to the long-haired teenagers standing in front of their amplifiers. The twenty-page booklet and deluxe pressing supply the photographs and chronology, yet the rough tapes carry another kind of documentation: fingers learning what distortion can support, drums forcing small rooms to behave like large ones, and songs surviving because somebody kept the recordings after their commercial purpose had apparently disappeared. Alexander Lucas does not rewrite heavy-rock history by claiming its secret center was hidden in Nacka. It makes that history larger, noisier and more truthful by returning one local current to the river that eventually carried the whole culture forward.