Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Vedina Mosé more than lives up to the title she has given her new album, The Soul Remembers Everything. In this case the songs she has produced for this offering are of such an incredible nature, both warm even comforting and yet prickly, taking the conscience of her beloved London and putting it on show for the world to see and offering the glimpse of a life in which the musician clearly has a long memory for every smile, every frown, each and every ill-treatment struck down on her, her family and those in which society has let go in whichever form that may be.
The atmosphere of The Soul Remembers Everything is one of message from a highly intelligent woman, a woman of the streets of the capital, and one that encompasses the feeling of neglected compassion and utter empathy, the twin vanguard of emotion wrapped up in the thoughts of the individual crying out for someone to notice the problems and ills that in 21st Century Britain seem to have hung around forever.
Vedina Mosé through her music also carries that wonderful dichotomy of having a voice that is delicate and beautiful, easy to hear on tracks such as Blue Borough Blue and Make Peace and yet strong enough to carry the weight of personality and expectation that a warrior defending the few would only understand. The feel of strength in adversity, the standing up for a cause that many would shut their eyes too and the harrowing scenes of 2011 all make themselves present and known in interesting lyrics and a voice that could carry you off to that safe warm place, the place in which only truth is allowed to enter.
These Streets and New Cross could have been sang by any of the great radicals, of speakers of honesty over the last 70 or 80 years, such is the feeling of unease that lies just underneath the surface, it takes its cue in parts arguably from the fantastic Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, the battle has never been so prominent as it is now and the languishing semi-hidden cerebral beauty of In The Morning is to be congratulated and thought highly of.
Vedina Mosé might not be a name that instantly comes to mind when thinking of great women vocalists and lyric writers but she deserves so much more recognition and that time will surely come.
Ian D. Hall