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Gus Black has always purveyed a terse subterfuge, a sound that has its foundation in singer/songwriter tradition and blanketed by thick atmospheric ambiance. This is, after all, an artist who pared down his handle to Gus for his first couple of releases, dressed an early album cover almost entirely in black and then drove the point home by including a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” If Black’s last album, Autumn Days, suggested an idyllic aside, his latest, Today Is Not the Day enforces the fact that dark days are indeed here again. Black could make Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley seem positively radiant by comparison, and, title aside, a cover photo of him emerging from the shadows, gun pointed towards the listener, offers no small hint of foreboding. These are songs cloaked in hushed, haunted circumspect and nocturnal rumination, melancholy, shoe-gazing melodies from a dark cellar where the sun rarely intrudes. It leaves the listener on the fringes, although a pair of songs – “Blood And Belonging” and “Little Prince Town” – suggests Black could be a little more embracing if he wasn’t so bent on introspection. (Cheap Lullaby 2008)
