Over a slow, atmospheric guitar, Evelyn Gray sings with a voice that’s somehow strong yet fragile. “I thought you knew who I was / I thought we had the conversation / Maybe I was wrong — maybe you don’t know me. / Well, I know myself.”
Then a second guitar joins in, floating into the space between the voice and the first guitar. Gray’s voice picks up urgency. “Even still, I feel it now — the bruises coming underneath my skin. / The feelings resurface and I’m too afraid to do this on my own.”
But Gray doesn’t sound afraid, exactly. She sounds like she’s coming into her own.
“Deadname” is the first track from the New Haven-based musician’s Live @ Backroom Studios, and its stark yet lush beauty — Gray’s music lends itself to somewhat contradictory pairings of adjectives — isn’t alone. The acoustic guitar-grounded “Severed Hands” chronicles what sounds like a truly toxic relationship — “your severed hands that felt me, too many times / taught me to act a certain way / now I’m convinced the blame was mine to take / if I spoke up now, would I be too late?” Gray sings — while still allowing her a chance for catharsis at the end.
And on “Accidents,” Gray picks out a delicate pattern of repeating notes to lay her voice over. By the end of the first verse, she’s been joined by an eerie chorus of high drones that swirl around her words. “Like the child I’ve always been / I’m being born again into a me I thought that I could never be,” she sings. Then another guitar comes in, low and fuzzed out, an element in balance with the drones above. It lets Gray come in at the top of her voice.
“I stopped dreaming of accidents,” she declares.
And started, apparently, making music with thoughtful moments of building and falling away, of seething, crooning, and howling, that are no accident, either. If Live @ Backroom Studios is any indication, Gray’s opening slot on Jan. 22 at Cafe Nine for Bitch Fit and Alethea should be something to arrive early for.
