David Gray
White Ladder

Deciding the sincerity of an album, especially if it is clearly pop, is always very difficult. On one hand, it's clear that rock, over its sixty-year lifespan, has (almost) always been able to betray itself and constantly renew, but the same can't be said for pop, which seems to have remained the same - compositionally speaking, but also in arrangements and lyrics - as what was offered forty years ago by Elton John and Cat Stevens, to name two famous and appreciated artists not only by genre purists. Generally, historically and culturally, pop and rock follow different paths, and in most cases, it is true that the honesty and the urgency of making music belong more to rock than to the so-called "popular" music. Yet there are exceptions, too often forgotten.

We will rarely find something close to rock in David Gray's discography; it will be hard to refrain from defining his albums as "pop". Yet, I consider him one of the freest and most sincere artists around. Every song of his, every album of his, feels like an impassioned confession, born of an inner necessity for catharsis of pain or expression of lost and found joy, which feels at home only when laid bare and not when shielded by distorted guitars and elaborate bass and drum lines. I find it very difficult to read in his stylistic and compositional choices any purely commercial motivations, as if his intimacy were actually prostituting his spirit and experiences solely for the purpose of making money. On the other hand, it's worth remembering that nobody paid attention to this English sprite's first three albums, and to release three commercially unviable albums (A century ends, Flesh, and Sell sell sell in order) requires courage and tenacity. From these first albums, emerges, timid and resolute together, blasphemous for many, the idea that a voice and a guitar can alone already recover something of the purest essence of poetry, with the addition of at least two fundamental components: melody - in his case, always of excellent quality - and the voice, the singing, which finds in Gray's hoarse baritone the anguished medium between artist and audience.

David Gray began to gather European success (though unfortunately not Italian) only at the end of the last decade, with the much-lauded "White Ladder" (released exactly ten years ago, in March 1999), probably the best of his career alongside his debut album. Not a true opening towards commercial pop, but rather a production choice that allows itself to be contaminated by a more modern and accessible sound, nonetheless within its own small, unique style. That the album was a compilation of potential hits was evident from the first listen: the piano-driven opener "Please forgive me" starts immediately with a succession of minor chords sustained by a perpetual beat of electronic drums (a trademark of the album and one of Gray's main innovations introduced to his almost always acoustic and sparse pop-folk) and by gentle violins, celebrating a noble and simple melody as befits classy pop. The quality leap from a song dedicated to emotional immediacy to a more mediated and atmospheric solution is also noticeable in the following "Babylon", a gem of simplicity but also a song of great sweetness, endowed with an excellent harmonic structure perfectly rhythmized by homemade beats and an acoustic riff that immediately sticks in one's mind, peaking with the chorus in which Gray urges us to "let go of our heart and mind."

Some of the introspective folk that characterized his previous records is found in "My oh my" and "Nightblindness", high-quality products where Gray's voice becomes more meditative and gloomy, capable of recovering on one hand the exacerbated intimacy of Flesh and on the other anticipating the winter chill of the subsequent "A new day at midnight" with the subdued and skillful use of a trail of synthesizers. The two ballads are interspersed with the cheerful "We're not right", perhaps the album's misstep, undoubtedly decent but below the level of the other tracks. With "White Ladder" and especially "Silver lining", he returns to terrain close to those ethereal and delicate productions that during those years were dubbed New Acoustic Movement, but it's with the melancholic ballad "This year's love", the best of the bunch and one of the most poignant love songs of the nineties, that the full emotional and lyrical potential of the English songwriter is visible. In just under four minutes, a piano, a voice, and violins are enough to transport the listener to a dreamlike and regressive universe, of an indefinable sweetness, which drags and scatters slowly only with the following "Sail away", an acoustic nursery rhyme that is also a gem of arrangement and production. The album closes with an unusual cover of Soft Cell's "Say hello wave goodbye", almost ten minutes long, which completely overturns the original version, once again producing an oxymoronic contrast between the calm of the voice and the relentless rhythm of the percussion.

Talking about a masterpiece might be an exaggeration, yet with this album, Gray reaches very rare peaks for music - like his - that is independent of any stylistic research and bases itself entirely on the lyrical and emotional aspect of composition. Faithful to a decade-long, and perhaps even century-long, tradition, should it spill over into the purest folk, Gray's music can perhaps appear reactionary and self-serving, yet it contains within itself the secret of emotions, which at times rock, especially the one closest to easy clichés, but also the more refined and mediated kind, is unable to show us with such clarity and sincerity.