A New Day At Midnight

“How the fuck do you follow up White Ladder?”

In the end, the answer came by accident, when the passing of David Gray’s father understandably knocked whatever his previous songwriting trajectory might have been onto a new course. The result is a reflective, elegiac, extremely personal study of love and loss, measuring the yawning absences of bereavement, and testing the fortitude of the relationships which tether us at our most bereft.

Unsurprisingly then, A New Day… is not full of Great Pop Things – lead single ‘Long Distance Call’ is at most a thoughtful, slightly remote cousin of ‘Babylon’ – but is an interior journey, heavier on atmosphere than melodic attack. This is all well and good except that the arrangements, hitting a downbeat, wistful stride at around Track 4 and altering little until the album’s end, let the side down: seeming uniform rather than cut to order, they occasionally veer uncomfortably close to the anodyne, chick-flick coffee-tablism Gray is occasionally accused of. It makes for a slightly too-lulling mood-piece rather than a masterpiece.

That said, the twisting key changes and all-bets-are-off panic of ‘Dead In The Water’ and the angry realism of ‘Knowhere’ are old-school Gray at his most caustic and tender; and the fizzing, bouncing non-sequitur that is ‘Caroline’ – a weird, magnificent, well-nigh flawless beat-pop single – effortlessly outshines even ‘Please Forgive Me’, its tack-sharp programming and a guesting BJ Cole on (demented, totally genius) pedal steel knocking it into the realm of the sublime.

So, an imperfect stopover; but one suspects that Gray had to pass through this valley of relative darkness in order to get wherever he’s going. His next destination will be all the better for it.