Drew Danburry - Goodnight Gary

Label:Emergency Umbrella Release date: 09/02/10 Website: Myspace Drew Danburry is an enigma. His music has echoes of the Mystery Jets and Of Montreal in sound, but his lyrics remind me more of Frank Turne, or a male version of Emmy The Great (although the latter comparison may be due in part to the fact that I’ve listened to First Love almost non-stop in the last week, and I’m starting to hear it even in my sleep). However, when you concentrate on really listening, he doesn’t really sound like any of these people. It’s a dilemma. If you put the album on in the background at a friend’s house, I imagine they’d spend 5 minutes or so trying to work out who it was, and the next 5 trying to determine who he reminded them of, before giving up empty-handed. Because for all that he’s not really doing anything new, he manages to take a relatively familiar sound and make it entirely his own. Some of his songs are about love, it’s true, but this isn’t the self-indulgent teenage public airing of broken hearts. With lyrics such as “Could you just hold me/stop touching/stop moving”, these songs show a more mature, more real take on relationships. When it comes to naming his tracks, however, Drew shows less restraint, ranging from simplistic normality of ‘Edited’, to the poetic; ‘The Joy of Yesterday seems so far away’ to the downright silly; ‘Dunwiddie is a great name for a town, but ‘Dunwiddie is a great name for a town’ is an even better name for a song!’, a slow, moving ballad that evokes (in me, anyway) that special sort of sad-tinged nostalgia, where on the one hand you remember your childhood home with fondness, but on the other you can’t kid yourself that you don’t know entirely why you left. Tracks on the album Goodnight Gary range from just him and his guitar to include pianos, brass, birdsong, crowd sounds, electronica and even a harmonica. The second track on the album, ‘Edited’, is characterised by that scratchy, far away sound designed to mimic listening to an old LP. He has a soft, breathy voice that doesn’t challenge, but draws you in, like telling stories around a fire. And with the acoustic, stripped down quality of songs like ‘The Joy of Yesterday Seems So Far Away’ and ‘For my Friends’, there is more than a little of a campfire feel to the album. Drew provides his own backing vocals for most tracks, but ‘Many Are Cold but Few Are Frozen’, the new single, includes a female vocalist. This is a twee sounding, bitter-sweet song about the trials and tribulations of relationships that ultimately end in failure, including lyrics such as “Love stories aren’t always a simple song” and “Friends and lovers come and go, not just in pain”, which speak on many levels. The song is characterised by a very matter-of-fact singing style, with both vocalists singing in unison rather than harmonising, and simple, bare guitar riffs. A lovely tune, whose simplistic sound is in stark contrast to some of the more complex, layered tracks on the album. The final track is followed by 2 minutes of silence, and then, with a quote from the Dead Poet's Society; "Are we just playing around out here, or do we mean what we say? All we do is come together and read a bunch of poems to each other, what the hell are we doing?" "Alright, but you still shouldn't have done it Charlie, this could mean trouble. You don't speak for the club", the album ends. The only real option is to go back to the beginning and listen to it again. What say you on this? Sound off in our Fourum!