LOOKING UP: Roy Davis. |
We know at least two things after Roy Davis’s January 4 Big Easy CD-release show: he’s got good taste — and a brass pair of balls. With Garrett Soucy (Tree By Leaf) and Pete Kilpatrick opening, the show was bound to draw, sure, but both of those guys are more established, and, well, better than Davis is at this point in his career. And everyone knows how a Portland club can empty during the break before the headliner goes on, if the audience feels they’ve already got their money's worth.
Confidence isn’t in short supply, however, in Grey Town , a place Davis has populated with earnest, closely mic’d vocals, songs of lost love and introspection, and a fair dose of the alt-country fakebook. Just that he has the ego to keep reaching for that falsetto he can’t quite deliver is evidence enough he isn’t self-conscious. Luckily, Davis mostly lives up to it, with a debut full-length that features at least one stellar song and a penchant for literate songwriting that ought to go over well in these parts.
My pick for multiple-playlist inclusion is "We’ll Always Be," which opens with the same cowboy shuffle of the bass and drums that made Ray LaMontagne’s "Empty" the best tune on his last album. Davis takes that opening and adds in a dash of classical guitar, then drops an earnest tenor that makes it easy to get wistful over a chorus that runs: "You’ve been runnin’ away since the first time that I came/I sat and watched the rain fall onto me/Everything was grey but the flowers in your hair/And we’re still here, and we’ll always be." At the finish there he arches up with a charge of passion, and there’s just the hint of a backing vocal throughout that lends the right spooky nuance.
This, like other tunes here, could easily have sat on Bright Eyes’s "country" album from last year, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning . Right from the get-go, really, on "In the End," it’s hard not to also hear echoes of the Jayhawks, Ryan Adams, Wilco, and even, in the way he swallows his "ar"s, the ghost of Woody Guthrie. He’s got solid depth of feeling — I mostly believe every word he sings — for a 21-year-old, that’s for sure.
Strangely, with all this talk of confidence, it’s a lack of a brash chorus or bridge in some of these songs that keeps the album from totally wowing me. On "In the End," and especially "Unkind," there are parts that just beg for a big crescendo, a crashing of drums and screaming like the "Fuck You" on Damien Rice’s 9 , that would give the listener a more disturbing peak behind the curtain. Otherwise, there’s the danger of monotony.
We get a tease of this in the coda of "Unkind," but it’s like half a crescendo, delivered mostly by the electric guitar getting moved higher in the mix. Come on, Roy, let your hair down a little.
