Unlike most of this year’s experimental pop, 29-year-old Japanese-Canadian Saya Gray’s songs have a clarity and a universality.
On Saya, the Toronto-born singer applies her oddball abstractions to a break-up album that finds regret a richer seam than possession.
The album covers the waterfront sonically.
‘Line Back 22’ and the opener ‘Thus Is Why (I Don’t Spring For Love)’ serve as essential samplers, melding Nashville-style slide guitars and steel pedals with gurgling whirligig arpeggios. ‘If you don’t like me now, you’re gonna hate me later,’ she warns on ‘Shell (Of A Man)’.
It’s a grief cycle, covering the age-old quandary of wanting and not being wanted. ‘Puddle (Of Me)’ — the girl loves a bracket — and ‘How Long Can You Keep Up A Lie?’ fall somewhere between Billie Eilish and her fellow Canadian Feist.
Gray’s restlessness can, at times, be infuriating but her saving grace lies in her ability to find that sparkle in the dust.
