Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
A certain age, a certain place in time and in your life, it can feel like the pinnacle of your achievements have been reached, the goals you set yourself or the dreams you may have once harboured with passion, suddenly fade, unexpectedly and forever, the seriousness of life sets in and the trudge towards home ownership, towards fiscal responsibility and other people’s aspirations suddenly become more daunting and demanding that your own.
To suggest it is all Downhill From Here is to do a disservice against yourself, to imagine that the world is somehow not willing you on, to at least have something monumental happen to you, that is the greatest displeasure of them all. and whilst the world seems to be stacked in the one percent favour, there are times when revolution is the mightiest of weapons and the world can turn upside long enough to cause a schism, to cause music to be the greatest heart raiser of them all and to have optimism raise its head in your honour.
The greatest of honours is to hear a musician, a vocalist with unrelenting tones, be softly spoken but hard hitting in their appraisal of modern life, to be heard without shouting, to know that what they say is what they feel, there is no lies, no half truths, no sense of anything but sincerity, of passion and of the need to talk it through; it only takes a voice in the dark to understand what they are saying for the lights to come on in someone else’s home, that by being honest they have illuminated your own senses and the home you call life.
Alx Green is that sense of illumination as he sings of the love and the regret we all feel, that we all experience, whether we admit to it or not, we all have the need to feel love. Downhill From Here is a song of difference, the song that can make a difference to the day, a song that can change a mood and one that fulfils unexpectedly, so beautifully haunting and yet so easily caressed.
To have that type of song in your locker isn’t giving into the world, it is shaking your fist at it and through the most beguiling smile, understanding that life doesn’t beat you unless you give it permission, that it is never downhill, just Time beating along with your own hopes and dreams; only when you stop believing in them does the world start to wind down.
Ian D. Hall