Ray Wilson: Upon My Life (2CD)

Label: Gordeon Music
Compilation length: 126:45 min
Genre: art rock
Rating: 9.0 / 10

Ray Wilson, the much-loved Scottish singer-songwriter who made his name as the frontman of Genesis, Stiltskin and Cut_, and who since 2003 has also been putting out a steady stream of very high-quality solo studio albums (nine of them so far), released a cross-section of his musical career at the start of this November. But heads up: this two-CD compilation with 28 tracks in total focuses on a somewhat later era of the artist’s work, the last 20 years. So the compilation still “catches” a few tracks from the Cut_ project and its one and only album “Millionairhead” (1999), while you won’t find anything from the last Genesis studio album “Calling All Stations” (1997) or from the notorious Stiltskin debut “Mind’s Eye” (1994), which brought this post-grunge outfit an incredible commercial breakthrough in 1994 with the hit Inside.

So that the whole thing doesn’t come off as purely nostalgic, Ray also threw in two brand-new tracks. The compilation opens with Come The End Of The World, which sums up the artistry of this brilliant, in many ways truly unique and ultra-charismatic vocalist in one go. It’s a great blend of melancholic, building mood, which is typical of how this refined and hypersensitive musician conveys his “mystique”. While the first track characterizes, through its compositional design, a fairly typical approach to Wilson’s arranging and songwriting in general, the second, the sensitive and fragile I Wait And I Pray, highlights the “softer” and more sensitive side of the musician, with the feelings magnified and deepened by more generous acoustic arrangements as well as a vocal duet with Polish singer Gosia Mielech. Both songs reflect today’s global crisis of total dehumanization and the loss of moral values, driven by an unconditional, unstoppable craving for ownership and control, or in other words “superior power”.

There’s no need to waste many words on the compilation. That’s obvious to anyone who knows this musician well. It offers an ideal look at Ray Wilson’s solo studio work in particular, as well as the later, artistically much more mature era of Stiltskin. Wilson picked the best of the best for the compilation. You could take that to mean that this guy hasn’t had a single artistic misstep in his career, which means he had an extremely hard job choosing the tracks that earned a place on this excellent musical-historical cross-section.

He did sequence the tracks so that the compilation actually works like a double album. The songs aren’t laid out in chronological order; instead, Wilson went entirely with his gut feeling for the running order. If you don’t know the musician yet, this is a great introduction to his artistic dossier, and listening to it is a real pleasure. Ray Wilson has distilled his artistic identity, crowning his big singer-songwriter charisma with a brilliant, delicate vocal and, of course, piercing poetry. The sense of great artistic aesthetics and creative perfectionism that goes hand in hand with this musician is not to be overlooked, and the selection of 28 tracks on this compilation underlines that emphatically.

author: Aleš Podbrežnik

You can already buy the album HERE!
Every ordered copy of the compilation will be signed by Ray Wilson.

CD1.:

1. Come The End Of The World
2. Lemon Yellow Sun
3. Take It Slow
4. Ought To Be Resting
5. Constantly Reminded
6. American Beauty
7. Wait For Better Days
8. Bless Me
9. Show Me The Way
10. Rhianne
11. Easier That Way
12. She
13. Gypsy
14. Ghost

CD2.:

1. I Wait And I Pray
2. Another Day
3. Song For A Friend
4. Alone
5. Not Long Till Springtime
6. She’s A Queen
7. Change
8. Ever The Reason
9. Along The Way
10. The Actor
11. Goodbye Baby Blue
12. First Day Of Change
13. Makes Me Think Of Home
14. On The Other Side

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