Review Summary: If you think it's just a breakdown, I assure it's not.
Gallery 47, for those who do not know, is the pseudonym of English songwriter, Jack Peachey. Although this solo artist has not reached what could be labeled commercial success, Gallery 47 have accomplished many things is their short three year span as a band. Tracks that Peachy has written have appeared on BBC radio programs, which led to recording at Abby Road and concerts at Strawberry Fields Festival and Summer Sundae Weekender along with a vocal spot on the Maybeshewill track “Heartflusters”. So it seems that Gallery 47 is a band one break away from achieving the aforementioned ‘commercial’ success. And after a debut album in 2010 and a self-described “strange collapse into early 20s depression” earlier last year, what has been produced is truly a wonderful collection of three songs. On Gallery 47’s 2013 EP
Dividends the acoustic singer/songwriter style is further solidified all while managing to prove to their loyal fanbase that Gallery 47 is a band that is here to stay.
Gallery 47’s sound can best be likened to artists such as Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, with calm finger picking acoustic guitars and comforting upper register crooning. Song structures are not complicated; instead they are overly repetitive, welcoming listeners to enter and snaring them with catchy vocals and Peachy’s penchant for heartfelt lyricism. The second track
Mr. Baudelaire boasts the line
Don’t you *** me up now quickly followed by the apologetic
And I’m so sorry for the language I used just now, see I just forgot myself somehow. While such honesty and critical awareness of self is severely lacking in music these days Gallery 47 forgoes the perennial detachment, instead opting for a stripped down almost beat-poetesque approach to creating songs. Each track flows without pause into the next creating a sense of one perpetual encompassing track, which is in no way a form of criticism.
While it is often with negative connotations that reviewers observe songs blending into one another without a sense of one song ending and another beginning, the opposite is the case with this release. With the first plucked strings of
All It Could Grow Up To Be to the fading of the final track
Close to the Mind it feels as though the listener has been on one non-stop ride, without any bumps or determents. The EP is barely ten minutes in length so the fact that the entire release feels like one vast track bodes well for Gallery 47; all three tracks blend together and form a cohesive ten minute snippet of Peachy’s life circa 2013.
Although this style of music houses many artists that are clones of each other, Gallery 47 offers a breath of fresh air. In a genre flooded with every boy or girl who was gifted a guitar at Christmas, learned two chords and call themselves ‘artists’, it is a great comfort to see an artist who seems to truly care about the music they are creating. Although it is a short endeavor, Dividends marks the growth of a songwriter who has yet to realize his potential, but is inching ever so slowly towards it.
