David Gergen
On Further Review
by Nick Parker
Just my luck: Having returned only days ago from a trip to LA, I have just come across a singer-songwriter from there that I completely failed to see play when I had the chance. Luckily for me I have managed to get hold of David Gergen's new album, “The Nearer it was… The Farther it Became,” and the recording does a great job of getting me close to the Gergen I wish I could have witnessed for myself.
Now I’ve survived ten bitter New England winters... My impression of LA was perhaps bound to fit all those tired East coast clichés about a city of strange light and calm breeze, built of a series of movie sets made real. Listening to Gergen, I have to admit, has a similar effect. His voice, like Beck’s Mutations, is the warm evenings I spent in Long Beach. His mix of processed drum-synths and acoustic guitars is that confusing sense of being somewhere made up of familiar elements put together in unusual ways.
And though my sense of Gergen is skewed in perhaps foolish ways by my roots here in Boston, that doesn’t mean I don’t like “The Nearer it was…” In fact, the album lets me feel refreshed and excited by new musical directions. If you are from LA, I’m sure you’ll be impressed by Gergen’s music. If you are from further afield, you can enjoy it all the more, like taking a musical vacation, not exactly to foreign lands, but to new parts of your own.
And though my sense of Gergen is skewed in perhaps foolish ways by my roots here in Boston, that doesn’t mean I don’t like “The Nearer it was…” In fact, the album lets me feel refreshed and excited by new musical directions. If you are from LA, I’m sure you’ll be impressed by Gergen’s music. If you are from further afield, you can enjoy it all the more, like taking a musical vacation, not exactly to foreign lands, but to new parts of your own.
Gergen by Michelle Fontaine
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