Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The only true surprise awaiting anyone who makes the right choice in spending that week’s hard earned money on Steve Rothery’s debut solo album, The Ghosts of Pripyat, is that it has taken so long for the celebrated and revered guitarist to place his own stock out before his own special audience.
As the title of the album would suggest, the feeling of lingering desolation stamps its musical authority throughout each track, the sound of the haunted exposure, the tales left untold and the evocative nature of humanity’s folly rip open the heart to anyone who remembers the scale of the disaster that befell Western Europe and the Ukraine as poison leaked out from Chernobyl nuclear reactor. It could have been so much worse. However for the people of nearby Pripyat, evacuation was the only course of logical action on their minds.
Taking a disaster of such magnitude for inspiration, the fall-out, in both senses, from such a dark episode in East-West relations, is quite literary off the scale. Yet the combination of poetic acoustic imagery not only plays havoc with how your own perception of such events would play out in 21st Century Britain, the initial shock slowly subsiding into tidal waves of anger as say for example great swathes of the country was sealed off and forgotten but also how nature endures and replaces Humanity as the dominant force once more.
The seven tracks on offer by Steven Rothery and his collected musicians are ones in which the imagination is king. With no lyrics to restrain the listener’s thoughts, no belief taking hold as the narrative guides the possibilities down an ever narrowing gap, what remains is more than just bare bones of an idea, it is the fully formed muse beckoning with tempting crooked finger, her skirts willowing in the guitar sounds breeze, that makes all things possible; anything you can imagine seem likely.
From the tremendous opener of Morpheus to the stimulating Old Man of the Sea, the compelling Yesterday’s Hero and the finale and finality of human existence in the album title track, Steve Rothery, Dave Foster, Yatim Halimi, Leon Park and Riccardo Romano induce emotional response, a craving for a different type of beauty, but one filled with critical attitude wrapped up in the purity of attaining excellence.
There has never surely been any doubt what Steve Rothery has done for the guitar, for British music in general and the sense of occasion he brings to the most delicate of touches upon a well taut string, in his own non-speaking poetry that make up The Ghosts of Pripyat all is of value, all should be allowed to be commented upon and the music says it all.
Ian D. Hall