Your reviewer recently caught a fine show from young Dublin-based singer/ songwriter GAVIN RYAN on his first foray to West Cork to promote the release of this, his debut album “Broken Blues” (available through www.gavinryan.com ). Ryan and his fiery trio gave their 45 minutes absolutely everything and threw in several excellent new songs which suggest he is already thinking beyond this record, yet this burst of feverish creativity still couldn’t disguise the fact the band were doing this on a shoestring and crashing on peoples’ floors as they made their way around the country.
“Broken Blues”, though, suggests that – if any justice prevails – Gavin Ryan oughtn’t to be doing the dues-paying routine indefinitely. It’s an album which immediately stakes his claim as a mature singer/ songwriter, whose muse has arrived fully-formed and fabulous and a record which should cement his reputation as a roots-y troubadour of some repute.
The album opens promisingly with “On The Line”: a blues-y, smoky affair with a fleeting hint of Dylan and The Band. The recording is very live, with whirring organ and Brian Connor’s sublime piano playing complementing Ryan’s commanding voice perfectly. It’s succeeded by the distinctly jazzy “Soon She’ll Come Running To Me”, which has a truly early hours feel, and while it’s superficially mellow, it finds Ryan viewing love through the bottom of a glass darkly (“teardrops slide down a whisky glass/ I was knockin’ ‘em down in some jazz bar downtown/ ‘cos I was feeling blue just for you”) and ends up sounding scarred and cracked.
Good start, but the album really kicks off with “Carolina.” One this writer had earmarked from the live set, it opens with a memorable, Beatloid piano motif before slipping into a poised, Ryan Adams-style canter with organ and lots of great, wheezy harmonica. It’s one that grips you from the off, as does the subsequent “The Sweetest Thing”: a sparse and alluring two-step with a graceful and understated feel that suits the emotionally-charged atmosphere.
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It’s not all downbeat and introverted, of course. The wired “E-mail To A Girl In Santa Barbara” cranks up the Marshall Stack in no uncertain terms; “One Night Affair” is a full-blooded Cuban-influenced outing with romance, temptation and mystery hanging heavy in the air and a wide-eyed Ryan admitting “she took me out for the night and showed me things I cannot describe” while “Broken Blues” itself describes the feeling of too many mornings after too many nights before to near perfection. It’s not without some wry humour, either, and when Ryan sings “I been starin’ at her legs, but they’re lookin’ like a pair of trees” it’s difficult to stifle a guffaw.
The album’s closing stretch, though, jealously hoards two of Gavin’s finest moments thus far. “Far, Far Away” is again built around Brian Connor’s piano and is patient and full of longing, not to mention featuring arguably Ryan’s best vocal performance, but it’s topped by the wonderfully sparse and haunting “Tenderness” where an all-too tangible sense of loss and sorrow is kissed by gentle finger-picking and drifting lap steel. It’s hymnal and fragile and perhaps the best song he’s recorded to date.
But then this album is refreshingly devoid of weakness and stands as a tremendous introduction to an exciting young performer we will surely come to cherish in the near future. His live set suggests there’s much more to come of this calibre, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: “Broken Blues” is heady, emotional and a dark night of the soul you’ll continue to enjoy long after the sun has come up again.
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