At once spellbinding in its decadent layering of string play and elegant keys yet wholly menacing in its underlying tone, it doesn’t take very long for “No Peace of Mind,” one of the eleven songs comprising the fourth album from David Gelman, Dusty Highway, to enrapture most anyone who comes within earshot of its mightily evocative harmonies. As you’ll discover on your own when browsing through the tracklist of Dusty Highway, intricate details like those found in this composition are par for the course in David Gelman’s latest LP, which sees the acclaimed singer/songwriter embracing the eclecticism that ultimately made past efforts like Last Surviving Son and All Roads Lead Here, so difficult for both critics and audiences around the country to put down.
There’s a tremendous amount of textural expressiveness for us to appreciate in Dusty Highway, and I think that in “Time on My Hands,” the meandering “High Road” and aggressively brooding “Dusty Highway,” it acts as a clearer channel to Gelman’s artistic core than any of the lyrics do, which is certainly no small statement to make taking into consideration just how exposed and open with us he is in his verses here. He’s got so much to share with us in each of these songs, and all of the material included on this LP, and by utilizing as much space within this master mix as he could, mostly as a means of conveying his deep-rooted emotionality, he winds up sounding a heck of a lot more focused and multidimensional than his mainstream peers have in recent times.
The production quality here is pretty slick from top to bottom, with the songs “Stuck on Broadway,” the patiently poetic “Maybe Tomorrow,” groove-centric “Lay Me Down” and chilly “Let it Shine” boasting some of the best polish to behold on the album, but I wouldn’t say that any of the material on Dusty Highway comes across as being either overly polished or intentionally gritty. David Gelman has never been one to weigh his work down with a lot of excesses that would be best left on the sidelines, but I think it’s worth noting how well he balances mild pop elements with grainy, DIY aesthetics in tracks like “Fight My Way” and the highly conceptual “Once a Part of Me,” which is something that can’t be said about a lot of the major label-backed LPs I’ve reviewed lately.
Once again, David Gelman shines like the diamond in the rough he truly is in this most recent studio work, which I would rank as being his most cohesive and forward-thinking effort to see widespread release. Thanks to his attention to detail and fearless refusal to sellout honest originality, Gelman is emerging from the shadows of a talented and supremely competitive underground sounding like one of the more important artists in his scene to watch, and if you want to know for yourself what all of the hype has been about, I would highly recommend checking out the eleven songs on Dusty Highway as soon as possible.
Clay Burton