Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 14/09/09
Label: Polydor

Most people think they've got David Gray pigeonholed just about right. An earnest, introspective singer-songwriter, popular in America and Ireland, whose sound and success bridge the gap in popular consciousness between the coffee-table experimentation of Radiohead or Massive Attack with the mid-market music-for-people-who-don't-buy-many-albums likes of James Blunt and James Morrison. Amiable, not unpleasant, but not much there to detain the more high-minded music aficionado.

It's funny how preconceptions are allowed to obscure reality; funny how the same people who tend to prize independence and graft, and associate those qualities with creative integrity, choose to ignore Gray's tortuous path and tenacious climb from obscurity to ubiquity. "White Ladder", the 1999 album that established the Mancunian singer-songwriter as an "overnight" success, was his fourth; it was also released on his own label after a succession of majors had found his blend of heart-on-sleeve confessionals set to acoustic instruments and samples too tricky to market. It might not sound much like post-punk insurrection, but Gray spent years fighting for the right to make his music.

He's spoken of how this album - his first collection of new songs since "Life In Slow Motion" four years ago - is the result of a realisation he could write about the world outside as well as the complications within. The spur to this, if the title track is anything to go by, seems to have been the discovery, in 2008, that Gray's 1999 hit, "Babylon", had found its way onto the playlist at Abu Ghraib. Gray, not at all unreasonably, took exception to his art being used as part of an interrogation process he considered torture. Here he tackles the issue head on, with lines about having to "take evasive action when the rumpus starts", about one man being much the same as another "'neath his executioner's hood", and calling for a decisive end point, "in the name of liberty, in the name of brotherhood."

Throughout this careful, considered and meticulous collection, Gray's writing retains this level of engaged sincerity and intelligence, its nearest relative the existentialist poem-songs of post-bike-crash Bob Dylan. The arrangements are precisely conceived, the recording often quite dry, leaving the instruments occupying a confined, sometimes claustrophobic space around the vocals. "First Chance" is a mantra-cum-shuffle worthy of The Band, lines about Moses and Noah meshing with a plea for escape; the narrator of "Harder" talks to a nameless other but can't recall "quite when the fog took your place"; the piano ballad/sea shanty "Transformation" is an elaborate meditation on death and decay into dirt.

David Gray might not fit most people's definitions of a revolutionary artist, but he's effected his own startling transformation here: the least one can do is listen.

    by Angus Batey