When you are nineteen years of age, hail from East Anglia and are about to release your début album certain similarities are bound to be drawn with Ed Sheeran. When your musical stock-in-trade is a kind of melodic nu-indie folk and further account is taken of those classic boy-next-door looks such comparisons become almost inevitable. Yet despite all of these correlations there is much more to Oliver Daldry than just this.
In his own words Oliver Daldry has been writing songs ever since he can remember. Already two EPs, one single and a video into a nascent recording career, he deviates from the lyrical path favoured by Sheeran (excessive drinking and computer games and other topics of particular interest to many a post-adolescent) for a much weightier subject matter. ‘Faded’ deals with the loss of his grandmother to dementia; ‘Concrete’ reflects upon the experience of being at war; whilst the title track, and album’s stand-out song is inspired by an old friend of Daldry having finally been broken by his life as a perennial outsider. Despite his relative youth, Daldry has a firm grasp of what it is like to live in a diverse world where oppression, alienation and fear exist and he writes about these issues with remarkable maturity, insight and sensitivity.
The musical orbit in which Oliver Daldry is spinning is the one that was left after David Gray’s star had so quickly faded. In that particular firmament he will now find himself competing with another young pretender in Lewis Watson and more established names like Ben Howard, Damian Rice and Sheeran himself. It is a crowded market place that is often full of winsome, mainstream pop and many another radio-friendly tune. But there is enough on The Boy Who Fell to suggest that it is one in which Daldry will be able compete and should he add some grittier otherworldliness to his musical palette then he has every chance to succeed.
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The Boy Who Fell is released on iTunes on 7th October 2013 priced at £2.49p
