Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Any anniversary reached is worth commemorating, however there is something inspiring about reaching 50 years of artistic endeavour, of finding that what you may have first laid down in the heat of a moment’s love, regret, resentment or happiness, is what has driven you onwards ever since; that first scribbled line as you declared your feelings towards a person or the wrath of government, that is the flourish in which you always try to capture and see as a daily, monthly or yearly Welcome to Anniversaryville.
Rab Noakes is erudite and polished enough to understand that just because a song is written in the present day, it doesn’t mean that it harnesses the same energy as what went before, and the truth of that is across all art, or even in the day to day living. It is an argument that keeps cropping up but one that is forgiven when you can combine your running order to the point where Time does not matter, where the only conversation to be had is just how good the music actually is, not where in time it came from.
It is in the sequence of events that the music stands out and in which the artist plays the tune, hand wrestling Time for a while and coming out with a sizeable draw every now and then. The sense of both care and duty is there to be seen in this album, Time letting its grip surprisingly slip for a moment as songs such as Let The Show Begin, Together Forever, Just One Look, Long Black Veil, Tramps and Immigrants medley/Tramps and Hawkers/I Pity The Poor Immigrant, A Voice Over My Shoulder and the beauty of Tennessee Waltz fill the unnatural void of silence that can arise when we look to music as a transient beast, one with a life expectancy of a year, six months or the one hot wonder.
There is nothing to be gained from the ephemeral, just the half-forgotten memory of the whisper in the wind that soon dies down and becomes fragments of glass on the floor; all that is needed is the sense of permanent and Rab Noakes’ Welcome to Anniversaryville achieves that in spades.
Rab Noakes releases Welcome to Anniversaryville on Friday 13th July 2018.
Ian D. Hall