Resurrected

Resurrected.

For me this is proving a year of resurrections, musically at least.  The musical highlight of the year has been an album and gigs from The Drays, led by one time Star of Heaven and Revenant Stephen Ryan. I have written about that album Look Away Down Collins Avenue at some length and am still listening to it months after its release. I have only managed to see them twice but hope to do so again next week. That would be more gigs than I went to in some recent years.

Probably the gigs I have enjoyed most over the last few years have been those of the revivified Blades, who I have also written about here. They also feature Conor Brady, a mainstay of The Drays. Jesus only brought one man back from the dead!

Top 102 Albums No Minus 15 - Look Away Down Collins Avenue

Top 102 Albums No Minus 15
Look Away Down Collins Avenue - The Drays

"I hear voices / said "I see the light" (I hear the light)"

After sixteen years of waiting there is a new album from Stephen Ryan, who first came took my heart in The Stars of Heaven back when I was young, passionate and impressionable. If you want to know what The Stars of Heaven meant to me you can get some clues here. He followed up his time with The Stars of Heaven by forming The Revenants and releasing two great albums with them.

The Drays feature fellow travellers from his Revenants days Conor Brady and former Would-Be's singer Eileen Gogan. Alongside them is drummer Paul Byrne, who played in Sounds Unreel / Deaf Actor with Conor Brady in the late seventies, and later In Tua Nua. (Brady has also been midwife to the re-emergence of Paul Cleary and The Blades in recent years.)

It has been sixteen years since his last release with The Revenants but he has been playing guitar in The Dinah Brand since then and has, it is clear, continued to write songs. Indeed he has been squirrelling them away against the onset of winter. (awful pun on one of the meanings of dray. Sorry). The presence of Derrick Dalton on the credits means that some of this was recorded in 2008 or earlier, when Derrick died. Also credited is Revenants bassist Naeem Bismilla who is set to be part of the touring band. Conor Brady plays bass as well as guitar on most of the album.

The Drays Paul Byrne; Stephen Ryan; Eileen Gogan; Conor Brady
(photo by ex-Stars of Heaven drummer Bernard Walsh!)

There's no attempt here to embrace anything other than Ryan's own heritage and as one of the finest songwriters to emerge from Ireland, and that simple guitar/bass/drums format harking back through the Byrds / Big Star / Replacements bloodline. With a small but exquisite body of work, why do otherwise? The quality of the songs here is an argument for longer breaks between albums. The sense of time passing hangs over this collection like a gently charged fog of years. There are songs that seem to catch life happened and happening, a sense that the people in them have changed, or are changing. Epiphanies, perhaps?

"Nothing changes then it changes a lot
Did you really think nothing would change?"

Fourteenth Floor - The Drays

Fourteenth Floor - The Drays

When I heard that Stephen Ryan (ex Stars of Heaven and The Revenants) was releasing new material I was excited. A year or so after hearing about it I finally heard it when the actor Aidan Gillen played a song on the radio when he was standing in for Tom Dunne. He linked it up with an Alex Chilton cover of a Seeds song - I Can't Seem to Make You Mine.