{image1}Maybe David Gray peaked too early. Or maybe he's just the latest entry in the line of One Hit Wonders.
In 2000, his brilliant "White Ladder" -- his fourth LP -- made it easy for us to think great things would come from this singer-songwriter. "Babylon" from that album became a minor hit but "Please Forgive Me" established Gray as a formidable pop-meister, if not a staple of safe outlets like NPR's World Café play list. OK, "White Ladder" was a bit formulaic, but it worked.
With "Life in Slow Motion" Gray shows that he needs to change formulas. Or maybe go back to the old one. Either way, he's lost the touch that made "White Ladder" so infectious and even enduring.
Like 2002's "New Day at Midnight," on "Life in Slow Motion" Gray turns out a number of safe, non-descript songs that neither impress nor offend. It's nice background music for a dinner party, but no one will stop the main course to ask what album is playing, if it manages to catch their attention long enough to realize there's music playing in the first place. It's like the stuff that Tom Waits referred to as "shopping music." It's not too interruptive.
Gone are the catchy guitar and piano hooks that marked "White Ladder." Likewise the straightforward lyrics like "if you want it, come and get it, for crying out loud." Instead, we get "Alibi," in which Gray spouts weird gibberish like "stone blind alibi/I will eat the lie/find the word/could break the spell that binds you/ prayers like ammonites/ curl beneath the lights..."
Yeah, and I am the walrus, koo-koo-ka-joob. And ammonite? That's got to be a first for pop songs.
The song is typical of the album, throwing sweeping synth and/or brass washes across goofy lyrics to create a big sound that reaches for magnificence but teeters toward irrelevance.
No matter. This album is a faint echo of what Gray once was, or appeared to be: An intelligent songwriter with a pop sensibility that made him both accessible yet respectable. The closest he gets to his previous heights is on "The One I Love," a mid-tempo bopper with a catchy chorus. But even there we get the flaw of Gray's odd lyricism. "Tell the repo man and the stars above, you're the one I love," he sings, in a line destined to be repeated by young lovers for eternity. That repo man is a real romantic.
Even the most likable song on the album is titled "Hospital Food." Is Gray just grasping for lyrical content? And on "Nos Da Cariad" you can almost hear a Coldplay album playing in the background while Gray wrote the song.
"Life in Slow Motion" is not a bad album by comparison with half of what's getting airplay these days. But compared with "White Ladder" -- and maybe it's not a fair comparison -- Gray seems like he's underachieving. He's shown he can do much better than this. Two albums after "White Ladder," it's not clear that he will ever live up to his potential. Or maybe he already did.
