Paul Armour, The Poets & The Beats. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

At its very best music should sweep you along, it should be rich, intoxicating and free to roam the imagination at will. Music should stalk the memory, haunting the listener, making them remember all the good times and reliving with passion all the bad moments so that they don’t become spectres of the listener’s life and times. Music at its very best should be poetry, the motion of chance and choice, the free style and the beat that should make the heart stir with a gentle tinge of regret and love.

The Poets & The Beats, arguably a state of art that requires a sense of purity, of noble gesture and the picturesque to be seen and heard, the vision to see both beauty and despair in the same sunset and the craving to live through that unhappy moment over and over again. It is a state of art that Paul Armour brings to the speakers and the attention of the listener in his new album The Poet & The Beats and one that is an abundance of flesh, graphic, detailed, tattooed, on the sturdiest of bones and sinew.

Paul Armour takes the poetry within the music very seriously, not just a subtle link to the genre, the nod to likes the greats who take your hand and make you feel your own dynamic lust for life through the intermittent beat of a human pulse, this is an offering, a joyous fanfare to those to whom poetry is celebrated not in terms of anything other than baring the soul, of seeking redemption in the words and hopefully gaining an ear of intrigued wonder in the process.

The music is sharp, an inspired aid to the vocals and the lyric, in songs such as Jericho, Ava, Diamonds For Stone and Nothings Going To Be The Same, Paul Armour lifts the lid on the poetic Pandora’s Box and instead of all the misery, ills and evils that would naturally come flying out in their grouped woes, instead the singular figure of the butterfly winged Hope is seen to emerge, one that beats its wings in time to the Poet’s widening smile.

A fantastic album to be introduced to, the hand of friendship offered and reciprocated from first tentative step to final flourish; The Poets & The Beats is a dramatic piece of art.

Ian D. Hall