Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10
In amongst the solemn, the serious and the ultra cool that the world of music has to offer, there are moments when all you want is the significant and the curious to open their hearts and deliver with open arms and a beaming smile, a set of songs that really let you see life as the witty and wonderfully absurd place that it is, even when Stone Cold Sober.
A world that existed without John Cee Stannard would not only be bleak and desperate, it would also only confirm that the toxicity of life would become very boring, very quickly. Like a man who finds himself at a party hosted by the gregarious and the fun loving where the buffet is all you can eat, the entertainment provided the best in the world and the Guinness flowing all night long but whose lot in life decrees that he can only stop 15 minutes as he has a cat to feed and the news to watch; the peculiar is sometimes not even sitting in the world of beige.
Following in less time than it takes to bring a child screaming into the world, John Cee Stannard & Blues Horizon have seen the Blues as not just a chance to write more songs in the same beautiful creative abundance as their previous album Bus Depot Blues but to expand upon that creative wealth, to pump it with more genuine joy and give it a reason to infect the listener with amusing tales of life and to kick the Hell out of the genre in what can only be a radical and upstanding notion.
There are those who believe that you cannot be that intoxicated with life all the time, or even for a partial segment of it unless you have something to hide; the only answer that you can give to that is to shake your head and hand them the key to existence, the irreverent but always respectful Stone Cold Sober.
The album is not only littered with the rich deposits of a musical seam but even after three albums it doesn’t seem to be abating or falling into the type of disrepair that must come to us all and with songs such as I Don’t Want You Anymore, the utterly brilliant The Story, Poverty Blues, Worse Off Than You and Right Back at the Start lining up with patience and fortitude to be heard, the music never feels anything less than perfection wrapped up in a jewel case.
The point though behind any humour is the truth that it contains and it is that truth, bold stark and genuine that makes Stone Cold Sober so elegant and eloquent a listen; for humour can only exist where candid appraisal dares to venture.
A stunning follow up to Bus Depot Blues, Stone Cold Sober is an album of warmth, humour and sincerity; it doesn’t get much better than that.
Ian D. Hall