Compassion by Rui Gabriel
There aren’t many male rock ‘n’ rollers who don’t spend at least one album being quieter, softer, and more thoughtful: Beck did it as far back in his career as 1994’s One Foot in the Grave, Nick Cave leaned into it as recently as 2020’s Idiot Prayer, and Tropical Fuck Storm frontman Gareth Liddiard created an especially muted space with 2010’s Strange Tourist.
Rui Gabriel, a.k.a. post-punk group Lawn’s co-founder Magalhães-Ortegano, is less isolated than those men were. Yet Compassion cranks down the volume enough to recall the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third LP, which VU founding member Lou Reed utilized, in 1969, to turn away from the clamor of the band’s first two LPs and toward a literary man’s ideas about pop and folk music.
Gabriel shares a generous handful of Reed’s vocal mannerisms: the slide between singing and speaking, the feel for street-level geography, and the seemingly casual observation of everyday existence (because Reed wrote songs about that sort of thing at least as often as he wrote about the perverse).
Compassion also shares some of Beck’s acoustic-side haziness, as if Gabriel and his co-producer, Nicholas Corson (a Lawn alumnus), have somehow found a way to bathe the recordings in the late-afternoon summertime sunshine that lends every musical expression—this drifting guitar solo in “Hunting Knife,” that “Sweet Jane”-ish chord progression in “Eyes Only”—a mellow, yellow hue.
Within the hue, and playing most of the instruments, Gabriel and Corson ignite many firework-bright sparks, including the trip-hoppy, Britpop-invoking “Money,” the basement-shaking drive of “Change Your Mind,” and the murmured “Target,” which beguiles even as its lyrics acknowledge a friendship that perhaps cannot and should not be saved.
The inclusion of fellow indie noisemaker Stef Chura, as a background vocalist who simply busts into the foreground on “Summertime Tiger,” indicates that neither Compassion nor Rui Gabriel is too quiet or soft for rock ‘n’ roll.
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