Music

Life In Slow Motion

David Gray

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category: Rock

I revere David Gray — my recommendation of White Ladder is pretty much a mash note — and so I could kick myself for interviewing him. (I mean, that’s Rule #1: Never meet your heroes.) As you might expect, he was a colossal disappointment: not in the mood to talk, combative about small things, and gobsmacked that I had never seen him perform live.

Still, I bought his next CD, ‘A New Day at Midnight.’ It was a total bummer, alternately pretentious and silly. If you want to know what a parody of David Gray sounds like, this one’s for you.

And now we have ‘Life in Slow Motion.’ Or rather, some of us have it. The bad news: Gray is a Sony artist, and Sony has ‘copy-protected’ this CD so you can transfer it to your iPod only if you have a PhD. from MIT and can do a complicated work-around. Meanwhile, on the Amazon.com page for this CD, the posters are out for blood — they give it one or two stars, as if Gray were somehow complicit with Sony’s bone-headed plan to make you pay for this music twice if you want to hear it anywhere but a home or car.

Me, I’d buy it twice. Not happily. But ‘Life in Slow Motion’ is the necessary giant step forward for Gray, who had pretty much done everything imaginable with music made in his bedroom backed only by guitar and electronic drums and a few sound effects. This guy has giant ambitions; he wants to fill arenas. And to do that, you need a band that can bash a crowd with a wall of sound.

So Gray wrote ten songs that turn his two subjects — love, and the difficulty of finding it, recognizing it and keeping it in a world that’s alternately beautiful and hostile — into anthems. He hired Marius De Vries, who has produced Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Madonna and U2 — not a shabby resume. And then he set about creating what you might call the rock equivalent of ‘White Ladder.’

He didn’t make it — you don’t get two ‘White Ladders’ in a lifetime — but he came damn close. And you know it right from the start. A few seconds of strings, almost sounding as if they’re tuning up, and then a slow, stately sweep of electronics. More strings. A piano tinkles. Then silence. And, all alone, just David Gray and his chunky piano, attentive to every syllable: "Stone blind alibi/I will eat the lie."

The sound is lush and instantly seductive and Elton John fans will swoon. But what do those lines mean? It’s easy to lose yourself in the voice and the music and the production — to dismiss the words as just more sound — but I urge you to pay attention to them, however abstract and meaninglessly ‘poetic’ they may strike you. Because they couldn’t be more calculated.

The title, Gray has said, “brings all kinds of images to mind, time lapse photography or someone standing still. But the sentiments of that are that we’re so impregnated with film and moving imagery that sometimes in your life when something happens like an accident, or someone dies, or someone’s born — whatever it happens to be — time seems to play a trick on you and the whole thing just seems utterly unreal. You’re so used to processing reality at a certain pace, as if it’s some kind of edited TV program. The shit that we’ve imbibed has obviously affected our minds and our perception. That’s the starting point."

The end point?

Drag a salted kiss
From this cup of bliss
Watch a new lie twist on the breeze

There you have it: ‘Life in Slow Motion’ is an invitation to dive into your own contradictions. And to celebrate them. Yes, celebrate, because this is the first David Gray CD that seems filled with sunlight. The clues are in the orchestration — glockenspiel? — and the harmonies. There are backup singers. And sometimes you might think you’re listening to the Beach Boys.

Okay, maybe it’s not a CD for the ages. But it’s brilliant pop, artfully crafted and wonderfully emotional. There’s not a dead song on it. I’m dazzled. And so relieved.

To buy ‘Life in Slow Motion’ from Amazon.com, click here.