Album Review: Adrian Crowley, Dark Eyed Messenger

Since his 1999 debut A Strange Kind, Adrian Crowley has built an enviable reputation as a songwriter's songwriter, a natural born storyteller with a rich and beguiling baritone. While his work can sometimes be easier to admire than it is to love, the Malta-born/Irish-raised artist has enjoyed considerable success ' 2009's Season Of The Sparks won the Choice Prize, and he has been nominated on another two occasions.

Dark Eyed Messenger is Crowley's eighth album, his fourth with uber-hip Scottish indie label Chemikal Underground. It's his great gift to write songs that sound as though they've always existed, and he just somehow picked them out of the ether. Recorded over four days in the New York studio of The Gloaming's Thomas 'Doveman' Bartlett (who has worked with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Magnetic Fields and Martha Wainwright), this album features 11 unhurried tracks.

At Bartlett's suggestion, the songs were recorded without Crowley's trademark guitar. Most of them feature piano, organ or Mellotron, resulting in a minimalist array of dream-like, ethereal sounds. It's a strange, captivating diversion.

Most of the lyrics would work as standalone poems. On the spooky 'Unhappy Seamstress', he sings, "First a sigh and then a curse/ Her sewing machine in reverse/ Followed by familiar clicking/ As she begins the unpicking/ And what of this frayed tapestry of mine?" It sounds uncannily like a Lou Reed song.

'The Photographs' is a mini-masterpiece, a series of old snapshots from Crowley's peripatetic life, which plays like a short story: "And see here/ The view of the park through the grilled hospital window Upper East Side/ Where I spent the week at your side/ On a makeshift bed/ Until your release".

Crowley is not the kind of artist you're ever going to hear on daytime radio. But that hardly matters. Lovers of great songwriting will recognise the sound of a true artist at work here.

8/10
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