Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
When a musician from New York makes a statement it usually pays to shut up, listen intently to what follows and then take in the enormity of what they have said or sang about. Just like Liverpool, New York, the cities on each side of the Atlantic are perhaps the closest comparable ones in the world. Never mind the size and scale of the two respective places; it is the beating heart, the artistic underbelly that drives the two seemingly polar opposites together.
When a musician from either city then takes the plunge to travel the Atlantic and make the other country their home for a while, these two worlds then collide and the music they make seems to take on extra gravitas. This is certainly the case with native New Yorker Risa Hall and her intelligent and up-beat contemporary rock sound for her new album Second Chance.
This New Yorker’s sultry and attention grabbing album speaks volumes of the talent that resides in the city that never sleeps. No matter where you go, there seems to be a musician with a truth to impart and Risa Hall does exactly that, she performs with sincerity and female insight. In perhaps the most masculine city in the most seemingly rugged country in the world there is always room for the female perspective, even if the listener has to go searching for it themselves in amongst all the crowded machismo and misogynistic nonsense that sometimes crosses the ocean.
Risa Hall and producer Nigel Stonier have combined well on this album and with the expertise of Paul Burgess on drums, Joni Fuller on violin, Laura Manship on flute and Piccolo and Tom Doughty’s slide guitar on the opening track Can’t Take Away, it is an a recording which takes you away from your own issues and worries and gives you an insight into the world as it is, not just your blinkered own perception of it. Tracks such as Shooting Stars, That I Want You, the album title track Second Chances and The Grail are wonderfully captured moments of time wrapped up in a lyric.
New York may be a city that is divided in geography but like so much of the good music that has found its way across the miles of oceans to the U.K. it presents a united front in its ideals and sincerity; Risa Hall is no exception.
Ian D. Hall