Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Every good song needs a hook in which to draw the listener in with. Some have them placed so discreetly that it might not be until a couple of days later as you find yourself working in the garden or preparing a late night supper that the hook becomes apparent. Others have you at the very start, they tingle with energy, they are demanding in their instant appeal and have something so catchy about them that you cannot help but listen to them.

For Nicola Hardman, the catch is appropriate, for in Little Fish, the key to the song resides in her ability to place an almost perfect, certainly enticing key that plays, wriggles, on the hook and dances with a solitary, tempting thought. The one key of a piano filling the once seemingly endless void with a voice, a sharpness that both delights the senses but also, and despite the frivolity that is conjured up musically, has a keen taste of hidden danger attached to it. It is like the siren call, you know it’s coming, there are even signposts and a person selling guides and a map with big printed letters on one of the large rocks, here be the siren, but nothing can stop a fully equipped vessel from hearing the song, nothing can come between a ship steered by a captain with an acute and sensitive ear from steaming headlong into the rocks surrounding the siren.

There is much to enjoy in this delicate but resounding song, it captures the twin emotions of simple beauty and in awe speculation, the deepness of thought that may be missed, could certainly be so when placed side by side in the gorgeous opening lines. If looking for an angle, there is only one, that despite not being commercially known, regardless of not being a name one may be familiar with on the Liverpool circuit, there is but a grace in her performance.

Nicola Hardman is one to look out for, by the sound of Little Fish, there is much more to be trawled and caught yet!

Ian D. Hall