David Gray: Life In Slow Motion

Herald rating: * * * *

In the years since David Gray's 2002 album A New Day At Midnight failed to fire as brightly as its breakthrough predecessor White Ladder, there have been many efforts to replace him.

Gray's White Ladder sparked something other than just multimillion sales - a movement of British singer-songwriters marrying their plaintive voices and acoustic guitar-framed songs to sparse electronic backings.

As Gray presumably went back to the drawingboard after the grim and unloved Midnight, the efforts to find a "new David Gray" have continued. Some have been worthwhile - Damien Rice in particular. Some have been pretty, popular but dull - hello, James Blunt.

But Gray has returned with an album that maybe should have been the natural step after White Ladder - a set of songs that think big and bold rather than stay faithful to his introspective bedsit beginnings. And while on previous outings it has sounded that Gray was sometimes applying for the job of "Van Morrison of his generation", here he can sound like a contemporary British answer to Bruce Springsteen - especially on the mid-tempo rockers of The One I Love and Hospital Food.

But where Life is Slow Motion is at its best is where Gray's widescreen sound - thanks to accomplished and graceful producer Marius De Vries - takes his songs like the slow-burning early Elton Johnesque opener Alibi and Gray's soul-bloke voice somewhere unexpected.

That happens with pleasing regularity throughout on what is a wisely economical offering of just 10 songs.

Some, like the last, Disappearing World, do go on a bit with a cloying na-na-na chorus. But others are a fine marriage of arrangement and Gray's distinctive voice and curiously glum view of the world. Among the most appealing are Nos Da Cariad, with its Coldplay piano, its Welsh title (it means "goodnight sweetheart"), its deeply despairing lyrics and its allusions to Gray's hit Babylon.

The track Slow Motion might be well named but it swings from its mournful piano-in-the-parlour beginnings to something sure to induce much lighter waving on Gray's next tour.

And From Here You can Almost See the Sea comes with a Celtic jangle to its guitars, and a falsetto vocal which sets it off nicely. That's just one song among a fine bunch which sound more than enough to give that White Ladder of his an extension to a higher level. And it leaves those new David Grays quite a few rungs below.

Label: Atlantic