David Gray
A Century Ends

In the early Nineties in England, some bands sparked the musical phenomenon known as britpop, which influenced the way pop rock music was conceived and produced for over a decade. Anyone who even slightly allowed themselves to be influenced by this albeit derivative way of making music would almost certainly have gained approval, if not from critics, certainly from the public - which is what concerns almost all successful musicians. There's nothing wrong with that, after all. Let's remember that even Radiohead released a britpop album. It was 1993, and the album was "Pablo Honey".

In that same year, slightly further south, a boy of the same age as Yorke but with a hoarser voice and a more naive and sincere lyricism struck a deal with an independent label and released his debut album, "A Century Ends". The album, of clear singer-songwriter stamp, would sell only a few hundred copies, making a mark only in the folk circles with whose culture it was imbued. The reason? There wasn't anything resembling a britpop track. But this wasn't a misstep. It was a conscious decision by the boy with the friendly face, and it would continue for another six years with the release of two more folk-pop albums that went completely unnoticed, until his deserved recognition with the more listener-friendly (but no less honest) "White Ladder" (1998). Thankfully, today David Gray is more known and appreciated than he was when britpop was still all the rage, and his voice, so unique and intense, a true divine gift, often comes to mind when thinking of artists who have changed the way pop was conceived over the past decade.

Indeed, I believe David Gray has made a small revolution in the pop realm with his albums. Artists who have always sold more than him and been way more successful owe much to his voice, his humility, the spirit he managed to infuse in his songs, and convey to his listeners, musicians or not. Reviewing "A Century Ends" is probably the best way to pay homage to this great singer-songwriter who has managed in just over a decade of activity to give us some of the best folk-pop songs of the last twenty years. One of these, perhaps the most representative, is also the opener of the album, the mystical, tormented "Shine". "Shine" is something simple and extremely complex together; not just a song, but a way of living music, of being it and producing it. The way voice and acoustic guitar intersect to support the beauty and significance of the lyrics is, in my opinion, unmatched in any other song, including those Gray will make later on. Here our artist immediately demonstrates a unique way of highlighting with his intensely expressive voice every single word and phrase of the text. The track takes on from the first listen, despite its simplicity a quasi-sacred significance, evolving into a sincere emotional climax leaving the listener breathless.

With "A Century Ends", we return to the ground, the pace is more urgent and soon an electric riff makes its way in, accompanying the decidedly more rock melodic evolutions and the text as powerful and intense as the previous one, though directed outward as an honest and non-rhetorical social critique. But, I repeat, we are far removed from the suggestive and ingenious arrangements of the first britpoppers. What interests Gray is transmitting pure emotions, as pure and simple, both sad and immediate, as his melodies. And indeed we return to pure melody with the following "Debauchery", another jewel of immediacy, played on an easy chord progression on which rests the passionate voice and a sweet piano to which Gray entrusts the poetic instrumental chorus and the play of references halfway between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. I challenge anyone not to think for a moment of singers like Francis Healy or Damien Rice, whose compositional evolution certainly passed through the notes of these pieces. It continues with the overly long and fluid "Let the Truth Sting", which starts off well with soft violins and geometric riff, slightly losing itself in the qualitatively too edgy chorus and barely recovering its right direction in the ambitious melodic peak of the bridge; to save is especially the inspired and tough text. More ambitious and successful is "Gathering Dust", reflective and melancholic, where some of Gray's favorite themes sweetly rest: time and loneliness. It is essentially a Leopardian ballad on the acceptance of pain - typically folk in this. Remarkable and moving.

The second part of the record opens with "Wisdom", where Gray lands on more pop-rock territory with a very U2-like chorus whose rather suggestive epic does not clash with the overall balance of the work. Artistically better are the confessions of the subsequent Lead Me Upstairs, whose beginning is entrusted only to the bass and voice to which the other instruments (including the saxophone) are slowly added in a dissonant and rough finale, and of Living Room, whose strength lies, as in the previous "Shine" and "Debauchery", in Gray's vocal expressiveness and the inspired lyrics that speak of abandonment ("If life's just a living room, then I'm in the hall and I'm glad"). The cryptic "Birds Without Wings" rests on a deliberately too poor melody, but unfortunately, in my opinion, incapable of giving sufficient stability to the text. In the tense concluding "It's All Over" the balance is restored, slowly unfolding into a rock outburst of over six minutes which all in all is not up to the initial triptych.

Time will prove right those few who from the start bet on this shy and sincere young singer-songwriter, who did not have a particularly attractive and marketable image of himself and shot simple videos where he walked on a beach playing his acoustic guitar and smiling awkwardly ("Shine"). At a time of assessments on pop music, as we are nearing the end of another decade seeing popular music becoming increasingly devoid of ideas and increasingly insincere and dishonest, it is time to look back and pay tribute to those who have honored and continue to honor with excellent albums rich in emotions and ideas the simplest and most spontaneous of musical forms.

"The hail storm tumbles
The rail line rumbles
You lie on the floor with me
Come closer my love
I'm badly in need
Of an afternoon's debauchery..."