Chris Rea: Auberge
Everytime I hear Chris Rea I wonder why he isn’t more popular. His warm, gruff voice is striking and powerful, and his slide guitar work, although not flashy, is expressive in a way that doesn’t rely on the standard blues vocabulary. His best songs are terrific. He deserves a bigger audience.
Then I listen to this album, and get an idea of why he doesn’t have it. About half the songs here are magnificent, starting with the opener, but the others are a little dull. The musicianship is top-notch throughout, making every track worth hearing, and if you give them a chance the lesser songs will grow on you, but in the end they still don’t quite measure up, and they’re similar enough to each other that I can see why some listeners would not stick with the album. Also, to my taste the production is a little too slick; it’s flawless, but Rea’s strengths might be better served by a more immediate and less polished sound.
Something else, however, which might have tended to limit his popularity is a plus for some of us: he’s a grown-up who makes music for grown-ups. There is absolutely nothing trendy or shallow or meretricious about his work; you feel like you’re listening to a solid man with something solid to say. He writes about his family a lot, and is interested in quieter pleasures than partying; when he talks about heavy drinking and so forth it’s usually as of something in the past. He dwells on the past quite a bit, actually, and for me personally the fact that he leans toward the melancholy and nostalgic is also a draw. I think I should revise my desert-island list of a few weeks ago to include a best-of selection from his work.
Reportedly his more recent releases are just as good as if not better than this, which dates back fifteen years or so (but the newer ones can be hard to find—see this post). Here is the title song from Auberge on YouTube (the “video” appears to consist only of audio). You may think you aren’t hearing anything for the first thirty seconds or so; they’re a little sound-picture of someone walking around in his garage, starting his car, and driving away. It’s quite evocative on speakers that can do a really good job of imaging.
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