Peter Gallway
Album: Muscle And Bone
Label: Gallway Bay
Tracks: 8
Website: http://www.petergallway.com

Long-time (close on 50-year) Greenwich Village habitué, singer-songwriter and latterly musical partner of Annie Gallup in Hat Check Girl, Peter's spring-2014 album Hello Stranger was a powerful slice of autobiographical writing, expressed through a coherent revisit of early songs, that impressed with its ability to condense much intimate depth and meaning into a lovingly stripped-down musical setting. Muscle And Bone is a similarly impressive, if even more experimental in nature, collection of songs penned in response to a world in crisis, that represent "a plea written in outrage, sorrow, anger, shame, hope, hopelessness, expectation, regret, belief, release and prayer": well, that just about covers everything don't it?! And the musical settings themselves are found to inhabit a comparably expansive moodily electrified musical canvas, ambitious and wide-ranging to match the highly literate, almost widescreen epic nature of Peter's lyrics.

No one track clocks in at less than just under six minutes, and yet each song clearly receives the timespan it requires to communicate its message or tell its story. For instance, the tumbling, rumbling, restless, busy backdrop of the ten-minute Downtown Ferguson interpolates midway a relevant spoken section taken from the writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Another song later on the disc, Blow This World, also utilises this device, albeit in a quite different context, whereas the defiant stance of The Distance Of My Fall was inspired by the life and works of Lorca. The hesitant, almost stumbling progression through the thought-processes of the simply-piano-backed Hymn is characterised by Peter's distinctively weary, compellingly heartfelt vocal delivery, while the almost obsessive metronomic rhythm of Reversal invokes a parallel feel of desolation despite its insistence on the image of the muscle and bone that provides the disc with its title, and the grinding grunge-funk textures of Tear Something Down work out of kilter with the pleading desperation of Peter's languid, confused vocal line.

This is an especially inventive singer-songwriter album, one that demands your close and sustained attention, not least because its extended adventures require time to unfold. Just one moan, however - altho' the package states the complete lyrics are available on Peter's website, well they ain't… !

David Kidman