Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There are some E.P.s and albums released that are designed to make you sit and listen to them, it is their function and reason to be. Whether it is your favourite band’s new commercial offering or an album that you have been compelled to purchase via the thousand commercials that have bombarded the television and radio, they have been almost solely created to make that awful thing called a buzz. In Ed Poole’s case his E.P. hasn’t been designed to make you listen but it something of a pleasure to find yourself doing knowing that the sweet sound he creates is genuine and honest.

Winters takes the listener through a trip of imagination, of days when the only thing that is possible to do is too pay attention to the music on offer and melt into the arms of a loved one and ignore the world and its wife for as long as it takes. Ed Poole has the disarming quality of a musician transposed, the image of a performer who in centuries gone by would have been as happy walking the lanes and fields of rural England and giving those along the way a song in which to think that the world is there to be seen. The rural beauty matched by the music is a delight.

The five songs that have been placed with the heart of Winters convey a sense of belonging, the troubadour finding a place in the world and passing the secrets of life along the way. Kicking off with The Fractured Sleep, the E.P. almost serenely goes along as if watching a swan delicately gliding along the banks of a county river but at all times the attentive listener knows there is so much more bubbling under the surface, the shock waves that are created by the downwards strokes are felt through every note and intense lyric.

Falling Through Ice and Calling Us Home stand out as tracks of real depth and exquisiteness, songs that match the grace of Liverpool legends such as Alun Parry, John O’Connell and Ed’s fellow Yorkshire stable mate Jo Bywater.

Winter may be coming but with Winters on the C.D. player, it will be a cosy and warm one.

Ian D. Hall