O.C. Album Review : Davis Lives Up to His Ideals

It has been a long wait for Mark Davis. The singer-songwriter emerged on the Orange County rock scene about nine years ago with the band Clockwork. He went solo, moved to L.A. and won favorable notice as an up-and-coming folkie but missed the brass ring of a recording deal. Now, recently returned to an O.C. base, Davis arrives belatedly with a debut album on his own custom label. “You Came Screaming” proves well worth the wait. Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent).

****, Mark Davis, “You Came Screaming”, Cutlet Records

With its delicate instrumental colors and subdued-to-moderate dynamics, “You Came Screaming” (which does nothing of the sort) is the kind of album that sometimes gets praised as a “small gem” or some such minimizing phrase--as if only rockers who operate on a massive sonic scale, like Neil Young, Pearl Jam or U2, can get credit for full-sized achievements.

In fact, there is nothing small about what Davis has accomplished. His thematic ambitions are as large as they get. Davis considers the currents that move us toward and drive us away from the fulfillment of romantic love, charts the progress and regress of a soul craving spiritual awareness, and ponders the fearsome price of freedom, and the even higher cost of shunning it.

Graceful, frequently memorable melodies fuse his ideas with feeling, and Davis’ reedy but firm voice, well-tuned in its Lennon-esque or McGuinn-like tone to express deep yearning, clinches the deal with the honesty of its pleading.

A wide, judiciously used instrumental palette includes violin and cello (in the darkly lovely mode of “Big Star’s Third”), Davis’ own piano and organ playing, and a deft but unobtrusive rock ensemble.

In his combination of intensity, intimacy, intelligence and rich musicality, Davis most closely recalls two other excellent singer-songwriters of ‘80s vintage: Peter Case and Peter Himmelman. Like them, he has found a way to make attractive and subtle music while laying bare his deepest concerns.

For an album of strong convictions, which it certainly is, “You Came Screaming” is freighted with a strong sense of ambivalence--and that back-and-forthness, that alternating current of mixed emotions, makes for resonant songs.

Even when Davis is asserting his highest ideals in “A Different Tune,” with its declaration of independence in the face of a disapproving parent, he conveys the complexity of his choices. His delivery, though firm, is not defiant or triumphant. The song has an anthem-like upward-reaching motion and features a bright, chiming guitar riff borrowed from Bob Dylan’s exuberant “I Want You,” but it is not a celebration. The song, and much of the album, becomes a gloss on a theme that Bruce Springsteen once put pithily into rhyme: “No, you can’t walk away / From the price you pay.”

“You Came Screaming” develops an internal flow, a cohesion that plays itself out in songs that work as thematic bookends. “Devotion,” a dark, tumbling rocker, weds the tense, tumbling drive of a bass line akin to the Pretenders’ “Mystery Achievement” to the mood of chill, bereft beauty of “Under the Milky Way Tonight” by the Church. At song’s end, Davis has reached his lowest emotional depth: “The wonder is bleeding on the altar / If life has no dreaming, why should I stay?”

“Devotion” had begun with the speaker gazing seaward, his spirits sinking with the sun.

Once it was a dying day that slipped away from me

I had no cure to give it.

She was laid into the horizon, burial at sea,

Left me with the living. Two songs later, in the kind of internal symmetry that often marks albums of especially high artistry, Davis summons the memory of that same symbolic horizon. Now it’s dawn, and the luminous “Andromadine” unfolds with the return of the narrator’s ability to yearn and hope for a rekindled connection to something spiritual.

I recall a shape on the horizon,

I can feel the promise in the curve.

Like a brilliant sun you’ll be arisin’

Overhear the cold and waiting earth. The album also includes “Hollow,” an eloquent, embattled affirmation that a life based on those unprovable ephemera, faith and imagination, will be richer than one lived according to the cynic’s hard evidence of human futility.

I guess yours is the real world,

This place where war is king.

The nights are cold and dark

And no one trusts a thing.

But I am captured by a star,

I know that I must follow.

If mine is make-believe,

It licks your real world hollow. By album’s end, Davis has ridden out the memorably drawn romantic heartbreaks of “Blind” and “Nothing but the Truth” and rejected the protected, insular, suburban ideal envisioned in “Stand on My Shoulders” (the one song that has a slight tinge of preachiness).

With the concluding “Reminder,” in which folk-rock rides a hip-hop beat, he envisions a complete rejection of safety in favor of imagination and faith. The song is proud in its ideals but chastened in what Davis sees coming of them: Its dark, straining valediction sounds more like a martyr’s final affirmation before self-immolation than a celebratory proclamation of purity and power. It’s a “reminder” of the ideals Davis cherishes but also of the price you pay if you truly give yourself to them.

Getting at large truths with songs full of human-scale detail and unsentimentalized beauty, Davis offers a great deal to anyone for nothing more than the price of a CD.

(Available from Cutlet Records, [213] 482-9090 , or 1101 Douglas St., Los Angeles, CA 90026.)

* Mark Davis plays Sept. 15 at 10:30 p.m. at the Hub Cafe, 124 E. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton. (714) 871-2233. Also Sept. 23 at 8:30 p.m. at the Ugly Mug, 261 N. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 997-5610.