Again featuring erstwhile Noah and the Whale guitarist Fred Abbott, eight years on from the first, featuring the five tracks 2022’s Medium Dave EP, from this is the second solo album by the former co-founder of ahab and Orphan Colours, its title taken from a nickname he was given while working with two other Daves, is themed around the idea that the ordinary can actually be quite good, our views moderating from radical extremes the older we get. As such it opens with the Celtic-shaded guitar ringing title track, a call to the self-appointed alpha males to try walking in smaller shoes rather than lording it over them to make themselves feel safe and important (“Nobody dared to look at you wrong/You relished the fear in their eyes/On top of a world you never belonged/ Knowing for sure that you’ll die/Should you come down from the mountain side”) but ultimately just building their own cage (“Right before I woke up from the dream I found you crying/Longing for a moment from the life you left behind”).
Joe Harvey Whyte on pedal steel and Silas Maitland on double bass, the steady walking ‘Sun Sometimes’ is about procrastination (“Been meaning to put up that picture/So long but I can’t find the time/Plant a tree in the garden/Poison the ants but I can’t find the time”) ending up “two steps behind all the time”. Turning to a different attitude, ‘Stop Panicking’ encourages the idea of taking things easy and finding a sort of calm in knowing you’re just a speck in the universe (“there’s nothing wrong with getting bored”) and there’s “always another life/To lay in the sand/Not knowing the answer/To find something beside the fear/To show me what not to do”.
He calls ‘Always New’ with its folky circling acoustic guitar line and echoes of Richard Thompson a love song with a twist, being about his relationship with alcohol rather than a girlfriend (“A cold soul at the bottom of a barrel swimming toward the light…When I’m with you/Everything’s always new”) while, from the EP, the strummed, vocally double-tracked ‘Never Did Dance’ is about coping with insecurity (“When I stand in the rain/I imagine I’m someone else/That’s how I get through the day”) and relationships (“I never was ready for you to take my arm/You never were ready for me to fall apart/We never did dance but we talked and it/Felt like love”), scared to take chances (“Beauty hides in the cracks I tried hard to avoid/Cause of some rumour I’d heard”). And then, “When true love crashed and died I felt bad but I never cried, I just got on with my day/Ten years pass and I’m laughing alone into a wine glass at something stupid I said”.
Reminiscent of early Paul Simon, circling acoustic guitar mixed back behind a deeper shaded vocal, the dark toned ‘Cold Station’ with its pedal steel and piano again speaks of anxiety and paranoia (“I stand by the cold station/Wait for my foes to come home/They’re gonna laugh at my way/My reason for being/Spit in my face/Break up my bones/I have been through this and that/I can give you hell/Though I don’t know where it’s at”).
Another steady strum with piano accompaniment, his vocal higher and lighter, again from the EP, ‘Universe’ shares concepts with ‘Sun Sometimes’ (“I’m in love with putting things off/Running off into the night/Spending all my money on getting fucked up to forget my miserable life”) and ‘Stop Panicking’, but here it’s about being the centre of your own universe, and the wry observation that “Once upon a time, being a loser was a badge you wore with honour for the whole world to behold/When showing your worth had nothing to do with the things you bought and all about the stories that you told” and wondering “How my moments will become stories when I’m gone”.
Double bass returning, apathy and shaking it off are at the heart of the jazzier late 60s folk coloured ‘World In My Way’ (“I was sitting home alone/On my mind it did play/How I never gave a rose/Cared about my birthday/Need to make more friends I think/Cut my hair, clean the sink/Make some time to find someone/Who cares what I think”), taking life in his hands (“cut my nails and bought some jeans/Got a job, joined some teams/Read a book about my dreams/My fears and all in between”), though, again an EP track, he sinks right back into a form of intellectual meditation on the piano-arranged simply rhythmic trot (here more Art than Paul) ‘In Real Life’ (“Lay alone disconnect the phone/Count 32 of my teeth… Sun shines on my face/but I’d rather stay at home/Solve the riddles of belief/Through the windows of a new world”), no longer riding through tunnels of stone but becoming one of those “curious souls travelling through time”.
Sung in a low vocal with flowing but slightly insidious notes, ‘Violent Animals’ is a commentary on the male propensity for violence at the slightest provocation, intended or not (“Late one day you frowned at me/Now look where we are now/Underneath the irony, were enemies no doubt…afternoons in Disneyland, he spoke of with a smile/Kind of guy who don’t do well, away from home one mile/Nodded and mmmm’d I did till, my patience turned to bile/Take the piss, I couldn’t resist/Now he’s screaming at me like a child”).
From the EP, the closest to folk rock with its ringing guitar, the catchy ‘Friend of Mine’ is a road song hymn to being self-reliant (“never had a job, never had children/never found god, never had nothing to fight for…never had trust, never had someone/never had a best friend that I can count on/I for one don’t feel so wrong”) and having a restless soul (“show me the road and I’ll keep driving on for miles till the next town comes/show me the stage and I’ll start singing/get those people dancing and swinging/It’s my home and I don’t feel wrong”). The very embodiment of the independent musician.
The album proper ends with the hushed, 60s coffee shop folky balladry of ‘Like a Flower’, again taking things easy in solitude (“I’m just sitting in a place that I call home/Watching tv shows through weeks of summer sun/things get better every moment I’m alone/When there’s not a single victory to be won”) and people watching (“See the people with a step that says they know/About where they’re going who they long to be… They don’t know the things that I know do they/Otherwise they’d keep themselves inside”). I admit, though, I don’t quite know what to make of its refrain “I feel like a flower/Sitting in the water/Looking on the Main Street/Safe inside/To wither up and die”.
There’s two bonus cuts, the first the nimbly fingerpicked ‘Alleyway’ which could easily have come from The Paul Simon Songbook, although I suspect the rather more earnest Simon might not have penned the line “gonna sing this song every chance I get to be alone except for the shower and when I am eating”. And finally, there’s ‘Two Steps Behind’ which is, in fact, the original EP twangy guitar, Who Knows Where The Time Goes styled version of ‘Sun Sometimes’.
Not really as alt-country as the press release would have it, this would have been right at home in the Soho and Greenwich Village of the 60s, its ode to the ordinary decidedly far more than average.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.daveburnmusic.bandcamp.com/album/medium-dave-friends
‘Down From The Mountain’ – live:
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