Even with the exception of its poorly judged drum loops, lo-fi affectations and preponderance of grating styles, there was something fundamentally wrong with Gray’s last album ‘A New Day At Midnight’ in that it didn’t have any real tunes and the awkward, scrambled arrangements had a habit of rendering all his lyrical weariness cranky and unanchored. With the death of his father both Gray’s muse and his clarity seemed to have deserted him. And whilst understandable, it was ultimately disappointing.
This time around Gray has largely dispensed with his thrift store loops, the scratchy lo-fi and the pedestrian tune-smithery by enlisting the help of Marius De Vries, whose duties have embellished the more recent works of Bjork, Madonna and Rufus Wainwright and whose graceful strokes have added a more elegiac dimension to his usual invective and supplemented the characteristic piano stabs with considerably more drama, more cinematic sweeps and more natural force than Gray has ever been near to approaching. True it has it’s radio-friendly tunes, as cheery, life-affirming single ‘The One I Love’ indicates, but this time it’s the lilting orchestral motion of tracks like ‘Alibi’ and the desolate, wintry landscape of the pitifully tender ‘Disappearing World’ that takes centre-stage. Add to this the immense musical volume of the heavy choral arrangements and you have something quite rare: a private and ruminative traveller weighed down with a suitcase of devices and a hatful of epic ideas. That this is Gray’s finest hour is undeniable. That he’s been rifling through the pockets of Rufus Wainwright, Chris Martin and the mercurial Ed Harcourt is also hard to refute. ‘Nos Da Cariad’’s pounding ivories and cynical twists of thought reveal trace sources of Coldplay at their bleakest whilst the surreal, detuned tinkling and swelling brass flourishes of ‘From Here You Can Almost See The See’ and the similar dreamlike fabric of the classy ‘Ain’t No Love’ confirms that the head-swivelling lad from Manchester has entered a considerably less predictable phase of his career. In truth, the difference between this and anything Gray has produced is the difference between things that go up and things that go down; those that hover and those that take flight; it’s more focused, more opulent, more firmly unorthodox and more tragic than an entire library of Irish novelists and more tuneful than a bag of penny-whistles, making a calculated risk seem like the inevitable lapse of one season into the next.
It’s not only the darkest, but also the least conservative hour that comes just before dawn, and one weary, unlikely giant is already stirring.