Album Review: David Gray, Nightjar

When Hot Press met David Gray at his Crouch End Studio in London, he was an artist all adrift. His 1999 breakthrough White Ladder had become the equivalent in Ireland of posh silverware, or a bottle of whiskey at the back of the cupboard. Every household in the land possessed at least one copy.

Having scraped through the 1990s as a starving cult musician, he was unmoored by success. His foundations were shaken further by the death of his father in 2001. That period yielded two of his most singular and least commercial albums – 2002’s muted A New Day At Midnight and 2005’s gently mournful Life In Slow Motion, the project he was promoting when Hot Press popped around to Crouch End.

The record represented a self-conscious attempt to break new territory – the material arrived with a hazy experimental hinterland, courtesy of Gray’s work with producer Markus Dravs. What was not known at the time was that the singer had produced an entire album’s worth of even more avant-garde music, which is now released as the fascinating and often very lovely, Nightjar.

It begins with Gray trying his hand at menacing trip-hop on ‘When I Fall In Love’, his ragged voice orbiting a darkly throbbing bassline. That’s followed by a bold shift into synth-pop on ‘Money’, where he sounds like a one-man Sparks having an existential crisis.

Electronica turns to gothic piano dirge on the title track, while ‘Everybody’s Leaving Town’ opens with the most surprising David Gray sound of all – a thumping groove that opens out into hymnal indie-pop reminiscent of peak Arab Strap.

Even Gray’s most loyal fans would agree that he has consistently done more or less the same thing across his career. That isn’t the case on this perpetually mysterious and moving LP.

It concludes with the brass-fuelled ‘The Final Order’ – a song about life, death and the great beyond. Here, mid-2000s Gray stares into the vast, ever-shifting unknown and wonders where his adventures will take him next.

8/10