Gemma Ray
The Exodus Suite

Gemma Ray has courage to spare.

She has abundantly demonstrated this throughout her still brief but busy career, effortlessly ranging from one genre to another, frustratingly unclassifiable for all those who would have liked to fit her into a convenient cliché.

This is exemplified by «It’s a Shame About Gemma Ray», an album composed solely of covers ranging widely from the repertoires of Billie Holiday and Etta James as well as those of Sonic Youth and Mudhoney, delivered with a talent matched only by recklessness; like a gymnast who, driven by an irrational instinct, boldly risks a new dismount from the bar routine, fully aware she will still land on her feet.

Her excellent collaborations with diametrically opposed personalities such as Howe Gelb, Alan Vega, and Matt Verta-Ray, attracted by her artisanal way of creating music, attest to this.

What is missing is the notoriety (partially) attained by some of her generational peers, perhaps precisely because she remains anchored to a traditional vision of musical work in every phase of writing, composition, and production, while at the same time shunning often pointless experiments, to affirm the classic idea of song form.

Starting from such premises, it is difficult for «The Exodus Suite» to earn new approval for its author, even though it is truly a beautiful work.

Conceived and realized in the early months of 2016, the album moves towards new ideal and sonic destinations.

It can be defined as a conceptual album on the theme of exodus in which theological and political instances converge, salvation and liberation, illusion and despair, like a temporal expansion of Bob Marley's «Exodus».

It is no coincidence that the work was conceived at the Candy Bomber recording studios in Berlin, in the same days when - just a few dozen meters away - about eight thousand men, women, and children from Syria were waiting to know their fate, saved or drowned.

Gemma moves around those areas constantly, repeatedly, for over four months.

These are the days when words are mounting around the popular referendum on the UK's membership in the European Union.

Gemma was born in England, in that Basildon marked on the map as the headquarters of Depeche Mode; she has only been residing in Berlin for a few years.

She cannot be indifferent: the fragments of «There Must Be More Than This» and «We Are All Wandering» say more than any senseless, interminable, and exhausted debate staged on the skin of men, women, and children whose past none of the protagonists know but on whose future they presumes to write.

In those songs, Gemma narrates "her" present, no other claim.

She composes a suite of twelve fragments collected in two parts, from which sounds unfurl for just under an hour: frequent zones of shadow, rare glimmers of light.

A deeply unified work from a stylistic point of view, one might superficially label it monotonous: Gemma's voice and her electric guitar, a church organ, sometimes the rhythm section, delicately move along the paths of folk, psychedelia, and torch-song, even surf echoes; minimal sounds, melancholy, and reflection.

Gemma has magnificently recreated on record the atmosphere of great intimacy that distinguishes her live performances in semi-acoustic duo: Tuesday she arrives in Italy for six concerts, in decidedly unusual places, Sora, Campobasso, Avellino; improbable that they will register a sold-out.

This too proves it, that Gemma Ray has courage to spare.