Review Summary: Necessary mid-decade classic: the closest indie has come in years to a full resuscitation
Canadian-Japanese songwriter Saya Gray has been a major event waiting to happen for several years, and with her second album
SAYA her time has come – and what a time! Her revelation of a debut
19 MASTERS and off-the-wall
QWERTY EPs saw her gleefully dismember the classic folksong, repurposing it to suit her R&B-adjacent delivery ft. endless and endlessly distinctive
ehs,
yips, and shrugging off conventional songwriting in favour of elliptical structures and unpredictable progressions. Her earlier work played up her unique approach to music and mercurial charm brilliantly, but it was so resistant to a firm centre of gravity that it virtually begged the question of what this might look like if she did push for one. Weigh up her ear for a good hook, her fiercely contemporary sound palette, and her obvious overlap with crowds (both folk and pop) who traditionally fare
much better with straightforward songwriting than without, and the fantasy of her sound plus concessions for a wider audience all but writes itself.
Whatever rough draft you'd imagine along those lines,
SAYA proofs, prints and laminates it. This is the record sceptics of Saya Gray’s previous material have been waiting to hear, and it seems practically destined to propel her towards a wider audience. Thanks to a tried and tested pairing of bittersweet subject matter and razor-sharp pop songcraft, the album’s nine Full Songs (and one interlude) are as gloriously immediate and as they are packed with imaginative details. Pitch it to literally anyone under 30 as a
catchy indie record with bittersweet introspection and relationship tunes, and watch it find a new home in their playlists for sheer earworm value: from the caustically jaunty single “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” to the indie folk heartache of “HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP UP A LIE?” to the keep-on-keeping-on anthem “LIE DOWN..”, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a record this creative that caters so generously to so many.
Perhaps most excitingly, Saya Gray’s newfound streamlined approach comes at little cost to her oddball M.O.. She is remarkable for how she irons out what would once have been a lone idiosyncratic contour into the basis for a full track, stuffing verse/chorus structures with ideas so prickly that it’s a wonder to hear them sit so naturally in a conventional framework. One thinks of her inimitable whooping pattern on “PUDDLE ( OF ME )”’s chorus, of how she fuels an entire track on off-kilter call and response overdubs and moody 808s on “H.B.W”, or of the vertiginous alternation she undertakes on album highlight “EXHAUST THE TOPIC”, pivoting from plummeting slide guitar to dizzying harp glissando to full rock band blowout; one grins.
For all its breadth of ideas and staggering attention to detail, my main issue with
SAYA lies in its attempt at an exhaustive statement. Its sequencing is spotless, its palette ceaselessly inventive, and its emotional arc clearly telegraphed (if a little indistinct lyrically) as it walks through the baggage the opening pair of tracks tries so breezily to leave in the rearview mirror – and yet some overly attached, biased part of me can't help but miss the feelings of wonder and intrigue from when Saya Gray was a suggestive entity and her songwriting voiced as much with what it said as with its willingness to cut itself short and leave the listener in the dark. It's hard to blame her for jettisoning these qualities as she rounded out her writing style, but she ties up all
SAYA's loose ends so neatly without reaching for a substitute; she takes pains to furnish a cleanly realised album experience one could applaud on anyone's terms, but precisely in doing so she sacrifices a certain amount of the cryptic allure she once did so well to make her own.
SAYA is still an easy triumph: however much its overall cohesion blunts its overall thrust, it's still an almost unspeakably audacious accomplishment considering the sheer number of sharp edges at play. From a genre perspective, it pulls off two significant advancements that feel entirely timely within the current landscape: one for folk (a songwriterly deconstruction act that has been on the cards ever since Bon Iver repopularised the genre as a studio-centric enterprise for the most anaemic wing of the mainstream) and one for indie pop (which will find no better answer than this to the Billboard challenge of Billie Eilish and her bedroom studio'd offshoots as a vehicle for glum intimacy). Saya Gray walks through every door either artist opened and many more besides; her fusion of styles is all the more remarkable for how it plays as a necessary evolution of every form it draws from, but there's something slick and meticulously curated about
SAYA that casts the shadow of
something to prove over its otherwise spectacular assortment of delights. Is this really the definitive statement its self-titled header seems to promise? There's easily enough quality here to earn the good faith acceptance that
yes, indeed – as such, I'm as excited for the success Saya Gray has every reason to expect off the back of this record as I am nostalgic for the time she kept us guessing what would happen if she played her full hand.
