Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Although it will never be proved, there must be a length of rope so vast and strong, a fastening so binding between Liverpool and New York, that makes these two almost empiric like states arguably the greatest cities in which music has such a power over its inhabitants that its influence reaches back and forth over time and tide and the listener is only required to do one job, to listen carefully!
Following on from the 2013 release of This is My Confession, Onward Chariots have released their latest E.P. Take Me To Somewhere and it is such stirring quality that the urge to take off the shelf a high quality book of maps and plot a course round the world, starting in Brooklyn and finishing in any of the quality venues in Liverpool, via wherever the urge to take a Volkswagon Campervan takes you, in search of the band playing live, is so overwhelming it actually ties the stomach up in knots.
Take Me To Somewhere, it’s not really an instruction, it feels more like a purred signal of future pleasure, a soliloquy in Progressive format in which the heartbeat of Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and Harlem beat down the doors of all beauty and sleaze that resides in the beating monolithic spirit of Time Square and asks that the huge iconic screen sends out a message of compassion, to urge empathy and a tenderness that a Progressive nature can hold onto.
The band have evolved with the addition of a host of extra musicians joining the main collective, perhaps no more enlightening and progression ensured that with Cassie Okenka and Jillian Louis providing an extra dimension to the vocal appeal. On songs such as Vacation, The Sound and I Know We’ll Find A Way, Onward Chariots show just how immense and encompassing the New York echo can be, the dramatic highs, the plunging guitar solo but all brought together with the image of the subway hiss collecting passengers like captivated moles scrabbling through the depths of the bedrock and the sheer size of population taking in the smells and flavours that once ran through the veins of Harry’s Hula Hut.
Onward Chariots are New York, they typify a memory that tugs hard on the rope and yanks hard under the Atlantic Ocean and calls out to what is its natural twin, two sets of people who get music, two sets of people who understand hardship and the downtrodden feel dished out by its relative capital city but who also refuse to buckle to the empires that be.
A great set of songs that capture, not just a moment or a slice of fading time but an emotion; an emotion that is pure and cannot be bought with simple adulterated currency.
Ian D. Hall