PETER GALLWAY Muscle And Bone (Gallway Bay Music GBM 109)

PETER GALLWAY Muscle And BoneSix months on from musical partner Annie Gallup’s recent solo album, the other half of Hat Check Girl releases his own first collection of new material since 2013’s ‘Hello Stranger’. Described as a plea written in outrage, sorrow, anger, shame, hope, hopelessness, expectation, regret, belief, release and prayer in response to the state of the world and featuring a cover photo of soldiers in battle and quote about brotherhood by James Baldwin on the inner sleeve, it clearly plants it feet in the politicised protest genre with two songs featuring excerpts from the writings of Gandhi and one inspired by the life of Lorca.

It opens with the slow-rolling ‘Anthem’, a kind of gospel infused peace train number with hints of Robbie Robertson and Peter Gabriel that features a spoken passage which, in its mention of Jerusalem, Mecca and Washington, underscores the universality of its message. The pace picks up with the 10 minute ‘Downtown Ferguson’, drums and keyboards driving the tempo along in a song about the 2014 shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, St Louis County, and the subsequent riots, sung in Brown’s voice with a spoken extract from Gandhi’s ‘The Story of My Experiments With Truth’ where he writes “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won.”

At just under six minutes, piano ballad ‘Hymn’ is the shortest track here, the semi-spoken lyric offering a dictionary definition of religion and a call for deliverance from our troubles, then tumbling drums herald the Lorca-inspired ‘The Distance of My Fall’, which, somewhere between Bruces Springsteen and Cockburn, seems to be sung in the voice of someone (a rebel?) facing execution in the lines “I stand unforgiven, stand to the wall. Stand for all that is true at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. In the dust and dirt the bells will toll.”

Hissing synth provides a march beat for ‘Reversal’, a shadowy song about diaspora and genocide, rooted, I’m guessing, in the exodus of Russian Jews to Europe, that provides the album’s title, and then comes the bluesy and jagged ‘Tear Something Down’ with its heavy drums, brass and distorted guitar, Gallway’s spat out staccato delivery capturing the thick air of anger and frustration that engulfs the lyrics.

By contrast, ‘Citrine’ is ghostly and spooked with its pulsing synth, etching the (presumably fictional) story of a Paris bank robbery gone wrong (“You did the best an innocent could. Words to warn, words to save, words to kill. Gunshot and powder and unmarked bills”).

The album closes on another touch of Cockburn with the snare-driven ‘Blow This World’, which, featuring a spoken coda of ‘Tango’, taken from Gallway’s poetry collection Big Mercy, and, joined by Gallup, the “Your beliefs become your thought” quote popularly ascribed to Gandhi, delivers both a cry of anguish and a call to arms for change in the lines “We walk these streets it’s like fire and ice with the hungry and lonely, forsaken, forsaken. So we’re gonna blow this world, leave it behind. Blow it up with hope, mercy and pride.”

It’s a slow burn album that worms its way inside you, both musically and lyrically and, with half of the proceeds going to Save The Children, one that can actually make a difference.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: http://www.petergallway.com/

‘Reversal’ – official video:


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