Bearing witness to the baroque clusterfuckery of the world is no longer voluntary. We are all forced to watch. Every possible catastrophe vibrates in our pockets, demanding to be witnessed. A busboy in Tulsa with a below average data plan now holds more of the world in his head than Alexander the Great. The human burden continues to increase and empathy begins to seem like something belonging to a nostalgic past, like a handwritten letter or sex on a train. The classic response to this predicament has been a figure of ironic detachment, a well-groomed young man drinking out of a red plastic cup at a rooftop party. He explains with a smirk why the good thing is actually bad, the bad thing actually good. But now Alex Cameron approaches with his righthand man, Roy Molloy. Cameron knocks the cup from the young man’s hand and Molloy threatens him with his life.
With 'Forced Witness', Cameron’s solution to the difficulties we face is a danceable and dangerous earnestness, a sense of honesty that heals and relieves even as it cleaves us or makes us laugh in self-defense. He’s offering vivid portraits of misfits’ views of the world, presented without illusion.. Recorded in Berlin in an old East German radio station and produced by Cameron along with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, these tracks at first seem shamelessly entertaining, the driving rhythms and rousing melodies embellished at every turn by Molloy’s warm hornwork.