Album Review: Baby Dave - 'Different Gravy'
Baby Dave shares new forthcoming album ‘Different Gravy’.
Following from the 2022 debut album ‘Monkey Brain’ which featured instrumental and production contributions from Damon Albarn, Issac Holman signalled to fans that he would continue to release as his solo alias Baby Dave with new 9-track album ‘Different Gravy’.
Earlier this year Baby Dave dropped the single ‘Sounds Good’ which is a taste for his upcoming album. The single's ingenious beat-by-beat retelling of a fan interaction who sent Holman voice notes who had an idea about using his dogs in one of Baby Dave’s music videos for free. Holman however had the idea of making these voice notes into a tune. This shows Holman’s connection with his fan, which is on another level compared to other artists, with him featuring them on singles and even got the name of the upcoming album ‘Different Gravy’ from a comment on his YouTube videos.
The single and last track on ‘Different Gravy’ is ‘Telephobia’ featuring Kate Nash, with Baby Dave grappling onto the all-too-common symptom of the digital age of us being more plugged in then ever yet feeling more disconnected to those around us. The track’s sense of melancholy is emphasised beautifully with Kate Nash’s vocals and the offset dose of Holman’s trademark lines, ‘I’ve been having trouble picking up the phone, but not literally though because in actual fact I can’t put this shit down.’ Accompanying the single, Kate Nasha and Baby Dave are the stars of a candy-crush promise of social media to a fairground setting, where every dopamine-hit experience leaves the duo cold, before they can finally kindle a connection to each other.
For the upcoming album ‘Different Gravy’, Holman headed to his local recording studio and linked with his friend and rising producer Erik Miles. Through the process of crafting the album, Holman has come to recognise that his creations as Baby Dave have become a necessary ingredient for his mental wellbeing. As he says that “making this record over the last year has kept me sane and made me feel more mental than ever. I’ve come to realise that I now need to make these tunes. It’s like therapy for me. It’s catharsis. It’s personal. Say what you see. That’s the point in this project. It’s about every day shit, as mundane as it often is. But even in the uneventful days, little things happen, and they’re the things I like to write about.”
The 9-track album kicks off with ‘Middle Urinal Business’ and this track is exactly what you expect with a funky tune that rolls into the next track ‘Night Shift on the Toll Booth’ which is one of my personal favourites from ‘Different Gravy’, ‘Don’t wanna do a night shift on the toll booth. Your mama told you to work hard’. ‘Jam on Toast’ begins with a melancholic tune accompanied by Baby Dave’s soft vocals, compared to other tracks from ‘Different Gravy’ this song stands out from the high energetic tracks, ‘I’ve been up all night, making jam and toast, just the way you like’, with the reputation of ‘making jam and toast just the way you like’
Another stand-out track from ‘Different Track’ is ‘Crazy Uber Eats Man’ that begins with the lyric ‘Creepy uber eats man, why do you think it’s okay to keep smiling at my girlfriend.’, ‘and if my girls not happy neither am I. I thought of ripping that green box of your back.’ From this track, I love the blatancy of it, backed up with an earworm of a tune and I expect this track to become well-loved and one of the most popular from this album.
Words by Bethany Simms
