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Steve Adey is a studio boffin who has spent his life working on
other people's records in studios around the world. The Brummie born
engineer has been slowly stockpiling material for All Things Real, his
debut release. This is a piano led voyage through midnight shivers
and 3am silences. This is adult music dealing with complex, slow burning
emotions and lessons learned through the passage of time.
The stillness in tracks like Find The Way and The Last Remark is
more than a little reminiscent of The Blue Nile in their
fractured slow drift. Adey's vocals aren't quite a match for
Paul Buchanan's, but there is no shame in that: Buchanan's voice is
one of those rare beasts that only surfaces once a decade. It's a little
more difficult to excuse the blatant lifting of huge swathes of Blue
Nile sound, though.
Find The Way is a naked torch song, the bare elements of
voice and broken, lingering piano chords drifting in the ether. The
piano part was recorded in a disused church and it echos with a quiet
elegance. The Last Remark follows a similar path - haunted piano and
swirls of ambient sound.
Although they are pretty and played with
elegant restraint, they lack the emotional resonance of the Blue Nile.
The songs never quite make the leap from agreeable to heartbreaking;
there is too much melodrama where there should be melancholy.
The cover of Bonnie Prince Billy's I See Darkness is
pleasant enough; suitably sparse but lacking the dark thrill of
the Johnny Cash cover or the skewered, off-key brilliance of the
original. The slowed down version of Bob Dylan's Shelter From
The Storm is more successful, the song deconstructed completely and
carried on the sparse sound of Adey's piano. The track builds slowly
with new instrumental shades added at the end of each verse. It's an
exercise in self-discipline that is perfectly executed. There is real
passion in the delivery and a sense of foreboding running throughout.
Dylan songs are hard to get a handle on but this is a clever
reinterpretation of classic.
It's a tightrope act when you cover such wonderful songs, however: you run
the risk of exposing the flaws in your own compositions. Unfortunately
for Adey he falls from the high wire; See Shelter From The Storm is by
some distance the best track here. Dylan's impressionist lyric and
sense of melody throw unflattering light on Adey's own work.
It's not
that these are bad songs, they are just not great songs. The sound of
Adey's piano tends to dominate the proceedings and it leaves the material
sounding awfully uniform .The arrangements lack movement or the element
of surprise. There is too much drift and not enough thrust. Just as you
think the songs are about to take off, they return back
to Earth with a dull thump.
If Adey had enlisted the help of an outside
producer, I believe the material could have really shone: with tighter
arrangements and more light and variation this could have been a late
night classic. Sadly, this is instead a missed opportunity.
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