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| Popmatters |
 Part, if not all, of David Gray’s appeal comes from his sadness. Rarely was there a moment of happiness on his blockbuster smash, 2001’s White Ladder. Even when the tone was cheery or the lyrics suggested pleasantry, he kept a firm grip on his macabre nature with slower tempos, minor piano or guitar chords, and a voice so honest that it would be impossible to not focus more on the cynicism peering through each of his words over the fact that he was singing the word “Babylon” a little funky. And that’s why the English singer’s latest effort, Foundling, shouldn’t surprise many of his hardcore fans. Sure, it’s a bit deeper than his previous efforts, and yes, to say the recordings are merely “stripped down” would be an act of understatement in its truest form. But to love David Gray, one must love the guy for who and what he truly is: sad. “I’m as proud of it as anything I’ve done,” Gray told The Guardian in a recent interview when asked about Foundling, an album he opted to release in the wake of the news that plans for a reissue of his previous album, Draw the Line, had fallen through. But even with that said, he couldn’t help himself from pulling back a bit, offering up a candidate for quote of the year quickly thereafter: “This record is going to disappear off the face of the Earth, bar some freak occurrence.”...full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| David Gray was always an unlikely looking popstar. Not just offering meat and potatoes acoustic rock, he actually looked quite like a pub dinner, like a rough assemblage of veg, or a mister potato head who, like Pinocchio, had finally been granted that meaty body he dreamed of. His democratic features made him look a bit like an extra from a Strongbow ad who had wandered into a pop promo. He looked affable, like a bloke from the office you might accidentally wind up having a pint with. He nodded his head a lot, like a puppet in a cheap advert. The proletarian honesty of his face was not matched by any politics, his troubadour shtick was airily vapid, the music had its sights set on little more than airtime and his bank balance. 'Babylon', the second single from his multi-platinum selling album White Ladder did not explicate the inequities of the West; quite the opposite - the Paul Simon rip with a big effective Manc-pop singalong chorus was the type of fare to launch a thousand ASDA love albums. He wore denim, polo and open collar shirts, his style referencing the Jam in the same way Tony Blair might have. But there was one thing he could do, and that was, in a largely mechanical but thoroughly effective way, to write songs. Anyone who can out-Coldplay Chris Martin with a lispy piano hook as he did to such bravura effect on 'Please Forgive Me' has some sort of cynical gift. A decade on from his stardom, this new album showcases his acoustic indie compositional ability. Quietly and demurely it sets out the range of his talents, which while they don't amount to anything very meaningful - he is still afterall stuck in the genre dead-end of schmindie, a schminger-schmongwriter to boot - smack of being generally sound....full text |
| Guardian |
| "It's the record I've been wanting to make for a long time," says David Gray of his ninth album, which arrives less than a year after number eight. Funny, because it's not so very different from the records he's been making all along. The customary bleak introspection ("Take me down, take me down," he sighs, preparing for the worst, on Davey Jones' Locker) is there, as is the neediness in his jagged voice, especially on the bloodily raw When I Was in Your Heart. The dabs of pedal steel and trumpet are also where you would expect them to be, prettifying the songs' guitar/piano foundations. Nothing new here, then, apart from a bareness that contrasts with the relative plushness of the last album at times, Foundling sounds as if Gray is alone with his guitar in the wee hours, whispering into a handy microphone. But if we've heard it all before, it doesn't mean Foundling isn't high-quality adult-pop....full text |
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