Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Time has such an effect on the way we as a species perceive things that it is possible to feel part of two different eras at the same time. The human capacity for imagination adds much colour to the feeling of displacement that at times a certain sound or perhaps a headline in a newspaper or even the smell of a long lost lover can transport the person back to a place where they have no right to be, lost in the cacophony and melodrama of Time.

When a musician sends you there, when you can be at home listening to a new album and surrounded by the grip of the present and yet feel the tug of the past pulling at you with a sincere belief that you need to wallow elsewhere; that’s when imagination, nostalgia and the feeling of visual revelation can come into play. For Chris Callander’s latest set of songs under the album banner, Ghosts Of The Old Casartelli, Time and its disciples manage with innocent fury to do just that.

The seven songs that Chris Callander has placed before the awaiting world captures the emotion of listening to a man who seems to be able to place one foot in either generation and come up with something sincerely beautiful. If the talk of ghosts is the theme, especially in the knock out album title track, then the imagery set down throughout is one in which to take notice of and let imagination take you back to a time in which they were flesh and blood, the richness of their lives pulsating the airwaves and the spectral enhancement enjoyed.

With additional contributions to the album from John Mac, Adam ‘Danger’ Lewis, Pete O’ Connor, Stephanie Kearley, Helen Maher and Thom Morecroft, songs such as Back In The Old World, the tremendous Maybe The Night, Howl At The Night, the sublime finish of Silence Can Talk and the aforementioned album title track, each song is given so much depth that it could survive for weeks underwater in the Atlantic Ocean with a compliment of a 100 sailors comfortably singing each lyric and humming each delicious tune.

The Ghosts Of The Old Casartelli is a piece of art dressed up as an album, the join is hard to spot and futile to try and see, for when art is as good as this, any era’s ghosts would value it for what it is, utterly cool and aurally fulfilling.

Ian D. Hall