LIVE: David Gray @ The Egg, 4/5/10

Welsh singer-songwriter David Gray made his long-overdue Albany headlining debut at The Egg on Monday night in front of a jam-packed, standing-room-only crowd of enthusiastic fans.

Not surprisingly, he leaned heavily on the songs from his latest album, “Draw the Line,” with the rhythmically hard-driving “Stella the Artist” and the tour de force “Nemesis” both emerging as highlights of his two hour performance.

Energetic and soulful-to-the-max, Gray also dipped deep into his songbag for such nuggets as the solo acoustic reading of “Shine” (from his 1993 debut album “A Century Ends”) and crowd-pleasing, powerhouse renditions of “Babylon” and “Please Forgive Me” (from his breakthrough 1999 album “White Ladder”).

Brooklyn-based quintet Phosphorescent kicked off the evening with a hypnotic country-rock sound. Clearly, bandleader Matthew Houck and his mates have some vintage Neil Young influences running through their veins, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

Review by Roger Houston
Photographs by Rich Orris