Gabriel Royal
LowDown
November 29, 2024
Gabriel Royal has had a career full of movements: from Oklahoma City to New York City to Tulsa, from jazz clubs and classical stages and teaching to a much-discussed career busking in New York City subway stations. His music, too, is diverse and mobile, charting a path through solo cello, piano duets, and pop-rock arrangements for a full band. Ultimately, at last week’s LowDown show, much of the collaborative full-band work fell flat next to his deeply emotive solo material.
Royal began the show on cello performing his own compositions, which seamlessly transitioned from pop and R&B to classical. On his main instrument, Royal channels a fusion of Andrew Bird and John Legend: a cool, laid-back, even sensuous sensibility blended with a sense of presence and technicality. His music’s mix of pop-rock and classical, flowing from one to the other as opposed to a strict synthesis, has its own joys. The simple plucked guitar-like rhythms end when the legato bowing arrives, and the classical sections work as shimmering counterweights to the straightforward pop-rock that Royal plies.
The breathy nature of the cello, its unique timbre, its insistence upon quiet, helped to distract from Royal’s occasionally less-than-effective songwriting tactics: an insistence upon cheesy rhyme, a need to repeat what doesn’t need repeating. Those aspects came to the fore when Royal was divorced from that instrument near the second half of the set. While he’s a more than capable pianist—a fact made plain during his affecting cover of Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are”—his songs suffer when taken out from under the sonic shield of his cello.
In the second half, Royal sometimes slipped with more force into those tactics, rhyming “coffin” with “awesome” over and over, repeating words where silence would’ve be better (as in his “We Did It” song, where “I don’t care who knows” does not need the “knows, knows, knows” that he attaches to it). And while in the first set Royal was a charming and affable host, his crowd work faltered in the second half, in which he told more drinking stories than anything else—while claiming that he shouldn’t tell them. Obviously, a good drinking story can be part of an artist’s act, but in this case, after a certain accumulation of stories, the point began to be groaningly overmade.
If Royal had played the first half of the show (minus the off-vibe cover of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” which landed awkwardly) and walked off the stage, I would have considered the night a complete success, my twenty dollars well-spent, my time well-used. His cello work is that strong, his songs that interesting. Royal is a massively talented and singular performer who writes a lot of genuinely affecting material, but the second half of the set lagged in a way that left me wanting less hype and more quiet.
