Search - David Gates :: First

EXCECELLENT

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber | Mahwah, NJ USA | 07/20/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Like or not, you gotta give one hats off, minimum, to David Gates. He has a pristine vision: Write well crafted music with complex, adult emotions. But make it easy to get onto early 1970s AM radio.



Listen to "If," "It Don't Matter To Me," any Bread song, and there is a depth and craft that most top forty competitors of the era couldn't even envision, much less match. For every staunch dove, for every rabid hawk on either side of the divide called America, 1970, there were regular, suburban, apolitical people like my mom and dad, getting married, paying bills, buying stained bananas for babies like me. David Gates wrote for these people





This solo albums carries that vision over from Bread, somewhat: there are pristine ballads that could pass for singles from any Bread album. But Gates also shows he is capable of more. The jazzy opener "Sail Around The World," the almost Latin "Clouds Rain," just a few examples of how amazing a craftsman Gates was. Some of the longer tracks here have constructions as ambitious as 1970s art rock. He was able to take his sound into areas I never dreamed he was capable of, and it ALWAYS sounds like Gates.





And seeing what a man of taste Gates was, it always works



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