A single listen is all I needed to become a fan of Peter Gural’s songwriting. The eleven tracks he composed for his new album release Birdy’s World never deal with life as we would like it, but rather life as we know it, both good and bad. I admire how flawlessly Gural has merged traditional pop music tropes giving it a personalized spin with deceptively thoughtful and mature lyrical content. It may sound like an unlikely marriage to some listeners, but I think it comes across as a successful experiment within the first one or two songs.
TIK TOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@peterguralmusic
I think it’s working within seconds. “Birdy’s World” starts the release off with such an effortless stride that you can’t help but hear it bode well for whatever comes next. The guitar parts for this song are actually quite simple yet, when tied together, impose an incandescent melodic tapestry over the number. Gural’s delivery serves the song well and emphasizes its lyrical strengths.
He writes with a great deal of empathy. It’s a seldom discussed character trait of popular music’s best songwriters and several tracks recorded for Birdy’s World possess that quality. “Around the Bend” peaks with its call to arms solidarity with contemporaries caught in the same struggles as Gural and you can’t escape its grasping for optimism substantial enough to continue carrying on. Gural’s faced personal trials in his recent history, and I believe the lessons that, for good and ill, provide grist for Gural’s songwriting mill ultimately encourage listeners to do more than endure, they gear them to move on.
“Lost Island Man” warns listeners about the perils of not doing so. I hear it as one of Birdy’s World’s most fully developed tracks flush with the keenest of Gural’s lyrical observations and tellingly keyed around observing the world outside himself rather than accounting for his impressions alone. These are songs engaged with the world and the world within. One of the album’s most ingenious arrangements arrives with the cut “CARE4U”, but it doesn’t pull Gural too far afield from his music’s chosen course. It certainly shows off his skills in song construction and the elasticity of his voice.
His singing defines Birdy’s World in several ways. The contrast between his vocals for “Flatline” and its successor “Your Colors” illustrates the wide breadth of his approach as each of the tracks has a particular set of demands. The former song has its “speaker” at a low ebb. Gural, however, transforms a probable dark night of the soul into a statement about a spirit still uncrushed and abiding. “Your Colors”, however, is arguably much more exuberant as the singer for that track basks in the intoxicating effects an object of desire exerts over his imagination.
“I’ll Be in Your Heart” will have its critics. Some may say it is too sweet. However, I hear it as a perfectly wrought pop gem without a single note out of place along the way. I dare say it may even be one of the album’s crowning achievements. No matter where you land on that particular matter, Peter Gural’s Birdy’s World stands as a home run shot of a full-length album that bears repeated listens – at least.
Garth Thomas