Bill Fay
Who Is The Sender?
(Dead Oceans)
It’s hard to imagine a quiet explosion, but that’s the only fitting description of the tune “Underneath the Sun,” from English pianist/songwriter Bill Fay’s new album Who Is The Sender? The song drifts along, but it drifts in a tide of building emotion, eventually arriving at an irresistible overflow of pathos. It begins with distant, echoing sounds that give way to an organ drone. That’s underpinned by slow piano with violin weaving through, and Fay sings in a soft and unassuming voice, cataloguing all the goings-on underneath the sun. It’s a subtle, gorgeous, and broad-scale lament asking “What have we done?” Fay contrasts images of nature with human-crafted danger via lines like, “Trains of uranium roll through the night/ to their destination underneath the sun.”
Fay’s plaintive call is often drenched in such roomy sounds, and his songs are slow-burn narratives. In some respects, that echoes Fay’s unusual career trajectory.
His first album arrived in 1970, his second in 1971. Those album’s didn’t bring him sufficient success for the record label to continue his contract, and Fay fell off the map for decades. In the ’90s, his growing cult status led to re-releases of those early albums. Another he recorded, but didn’t release arrived on CD in 2005. In 2012, Fay released Life Is People, his first album of newly penned original material in decades. This year, Who Is the Sender? brings a second new batch.
There’s an air of humility, maybe even shyness in Fay’s songs, and listening to them feels almost like eavesdropping. His musings feel personal and richly realized at once. They sneak up on you, but their quiet evocations are well worth repeated listens.
The album’s cryptic title comes from Fay’s feeling that “music gives.” But if it dispatches its riches through musicians, Fay wonders, then who is the sender? That approach leads him to the term he uses to describe his own music: “alternative gospel.”•
