David Gray: A New Day At Midnight

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

That the English singer-songwriter's previous White Ladder achieved stratospheric international sales after its predecessors disappeared without trace was one of those great music industry stories. One that showed that in this business you make your own luck, and that sometimes labels just get in the way, while being a triumph for the common bloke and common good taste.

All the marketing, image-making and lavish production can still pale in comparison to a good song, delivered in an honest and distinctive voice which reflects something that doesn't figure much in the charts and which most of us know as "real life".

There's quite a bit of that on this follow-up. It's an album which moves not a jot from the folk-with-semi-electronic-optional-extras approach of White Ladder but still manages to be fresh, understated and affecting, while voice-wise this is sounding like Gray's second interview for the position advertised as "Van Morrison of his generation".

It is a little glum in mood, and it might not have the banner-wavers that the likes of singles Babylon and Sail Away were for White Ladder.

But on the first track Gray manages to be rousing while contemplating mortality (Dead In The Water). Mainly, though, he's still making judicious use of his favourite term of endearment "honey" on songs about love in a recognisable form, whether it's under strain (Long Distance Call), doomed (Freedom), unrequited (Caroline), or hopefully about to be acted on (Be Mine - a shuffling anthem that might actually get those banners waving as a single).

It ends on the quietly majestic piano ballad The Other Side, where his cracked voice pulls the end of the song up short on the line "Honey if I'm honest/ I still don't know what love is".

That may be. But the mainstream pop world where Gray now finds himself is a better place for his ongoing contemplation of the subject, as this solid follow-up album shows.

Label: Eastwest