Influenced by the likes of Bon Iver, Damien Jurado, Midlake, Elvis Costello and Richard Dawkins, january son’s self-released debut album Occitan Reverb flies in the face of conventional rock and roll wisdom: imply godlessness while soulfully singing to the heavens – but never admit to atheism.

A solo artist based in the California Bay Area, Alexander Lewis, a.k.a. (the pointedly lower-case) january son, wraps his confession of  “nonbelief” in metaphor across the album’s eight tracks. With the exception of some carefully placed pedal steel guitar, three-piece bar band flavor, soaring harmonies, and one out-and-out hootenanny, the mostly spare arrangements allow us to focus on Lewis’ lyrics.

But as january son mischievously explores both sides of Heaven’s gates, two plus two does not always equal four. The album’s opening track, Lead On, finds the narrator begging “at the foot [of his lover’s] temple.” Two tracks later with I Believe, his lover answers back that while “you believe in those diamonds in the sky… they’re not the kind I like…. I don’t need your silly diamonds in the sky.” It’s a struggle going back to Lewis’ upbringing as the latchkey kid of a single working mom.

Combine endless Sundays languishing in Southern Baptist bible school deep in suburban Atlanta with a healthy diet of Three’s Company, weekends with Dad, top-forty radio, and classic country and the inevitable result? An unbridled angst and a middle finger for the almighty, both equally unmistakable in his work.In The Wolf – House of a Thousand Leaves, an apostate wanders, lost for a lifetime, only to suffer a rough, impersonal burial at the hands of the church. Listen further and voices ascend from a ghost town like angels escaping Hell in the finale of A Town Called Peace. The title of the album’s closing track says it all: I Won’t Know. How could anyone say they believe in god when all we know for sure is science? God is found here, sort of – but only in the details.

More information on january son can be found at januaryson.org.

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