Search - Gus Black :: Autumn Days

Wistful melancholia is often the mother's milk of contemporary singer-songwriters, yet few manage to evoke it with the insouciant, fragile charm and parched wit of L.A. troubadour Gus Black. On his fourth album, Black manages to evoke an even more delicately shaded emotional and musical palette than usual, a sensibility rooted in the arc of personal romantic collapse that is the album's driving artistic conceit. Songs like the impressionistic "Long Beach" and single "Certain Kind of Light" crackle with an urgent, nervous energy that contrasts sharply with the stately grace of the falsetto-voiced "Weekend Soldier" and spare, lilting accusations of the bittersweet "Devil's Spine." Fans of The O.C. may already be familiar with the wispy-voiced melodramatics of "Trillion Things," but it's hardly the best thing on an album where Black hasn't so much abandoned his taste for unusual textures as subdued and underplayed them masterfully well. --Jerry McCulley