Album Review of
Gold

Written by Robert Silverstein
October 17, 2022 - 6:08pm EDT
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Gold is the most recent album by Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist Ashley Davies. Although the album does pay tribute to the guitar-centric sound of the mid to late 1960s, much of the 10-track, 36-minute album falls into a deeply eclectic genre of orchestrated rock-based instrumentals. The lead-off track, “Birth” sounds inspired by the instrumental music side of the U.K. band Stackridge with a little Penguin Café Orchestra mixed in. Assisting Ashley on Gold are a number of musicians, including cameo vocalists Karen Rush and Tess McKenna, a veritable string section with violinists Lizzy Welsh and Erkki Veltheim and cellist Katherine Philp as well as Sam Lemann on second electric lead guitar and mandolin, to name several of the musicians here. Overall, Gold is an impressive showcase for Ashley’s drumming, percussion and synth / keyboards, while it’s also worth noting that his acoustic and electric guitar work is also prominent on many of the Gold tracks. Another key to the sound of Gold is Ashley’s string arranger Bryony Marks.

The liner notes of Gold, available so far only on black vinyl and digital download, fills the listener in about the significance of the album, which serves as a kind of instrumental tribute to Ashley’s Uncle Len, a World War II hero, and specifically the few hundred paintings Len did, expressly those in “The Lasseter Series”. Gold has a very cinematic sound with Ashley adding, “I  turned Len’s paintings and his story into a short film using the music from the album as the soundtrack and have recently won 4 awards from film festivals in New York.” According to Ashley, “I had been wanting to do an “up” record for a while. Something that would stimulate and inspire the listener in an emotional way much like the Lasseter paintings had made me feel, and so, with that in mind, I set out to write an album of ten instrumental pieces of music that would go with each of the Lasseter paintings.”

Too upbeat to fit into contemporary prog-rock and too complex for background soundtrack music, Gold in its place sparks the imagination with a series of beguiling, rock-centric instrumentals that thrives in a variety of sonic settings. With ten tracks clocking in at 36 minutes, Gold is guaranteed to move listeners to the brink of sonic wonderment as they delve into the widescreen musical imagination of Ashley Davies.