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CD: Josh Bray - Whisky & Wool

West Country tunesmith taps into lineage of classic British songwriters

by Adam SweetingSunday, 13 March 2011

Josh Bray's songs are mellow on the surface, but there's turmoil churning underneath

This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana to Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. It's his English Pastoral mode which leads off the disc in the shape of opening track "The River Song" (obviously no possible relation to Drake's "Riverman"), with its wistful acoustic guitar, strings and harmonica.

It's followed by the gorgeous "Rise", a rolling elegy to memory, nostalgia and some kind of spiritual connection to nature ("You were the secret that we told to the sea, and the sea don't believe human lies"). It's a clue to the way that the more you dig into Bray's songs, the more you find that their seeming mellowness conceals 57 varieties of quiet anguish, hinting that their author has done more than his fair share of emotional off-roading. He expresses this forthrightly in the Traffic-like rocker "Hard Living" (an activity which, he suggests, "takes a heavy toll on your eternal soul").

Elsewhere, the tunesmith's inner struggles emerge more subtly, though a crisis of faith seems to underpin several of these lyrics. In "The Finest Chance", he not only shows off some nimble acoustic fingerpicking, but urges listeners to "beware of tales involving wine and water". In "This is Life", he proposes to "bleed my body into this earthly glory". The last track, "Testify", is like a retrospective manifesto for the entire disc. Constructed from a couple of guitars, bass and Bray's light but forceful voice, it seems to look back over bitter campaigns of spiritual warfare, as he sings about "the times that you plead for a painless release from this life", and how "God is no god of mine, I don't see his face".

I could go on, perhaps about the epic sense of quest in "Indian Gin" or the haunting mix of cello and acoustic guitar in "Bigger Than the Both of Us", but I'd hate to bore y'all. Suffice to say that this may be the most fully formed debut to appear since Ray LaMontagne's Trouble. And approach with caution - beneath their fastidiously crafted surfaces, these songs can kill.

Find Josh Bray on Amazon

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Watch video of "Rise"

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