Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Life is such that the sound of an unfamiliar outsider makes their presence known, we can often be forgiven for recoiling at the outlandish oddity of their voice, the startle in which the mind refuses to comprehend, the feeling of disconcertment when their phrases shake your beliefs and the shutters and the walls start to begin to appear between you and them.
We are often on the receiving end of such moments, as well as perhaps being the instigator of such troubled civil alarm, and yet, it feels perhaps more in keeping believing we are the ones to whom the world should be astonished by our forthright views, the honesty in our thoughts, and when you look at the company you find, the thought of A Stranger I Came to you is perhaps the sincerest of them all.
The visionary finds such moments illuminating, and in the exceptional observational virtuosity of Phil Hare, the enlightenment comes with the praise of education, of remembering that we are born with the sense of compassion built into our D.N.A., it is our job to remind people every day to seek out it out, to offer it with no thought of reward; the stranger in our midst is not out to overturn our lives or destroy our belief, but to offer perhaps a different solution in which we can feel the love we deny ourselves.
Phil Hare’s album is a Folk album that restores that faith, even when the biting lip digs down too deep and blood is drawn, for in the softness of rage, lays an even greater sense of reason, the power to change people’s minds. In songs such as Blarney Pilgrim, Nigel Farage Swimming the Channel, the humble but beautifully sarcastic I’ve Got My Country Back, Can’t Quote Shakespeare, Text 0898, the strength of time’s intelligence in Will You Marry Me, Broken Society, the passion and melancholy of the instrumental of covering Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time and the finale of You Never Really Went, Phil Hare is the singing medic to whom our at times soul deprived patient longs for.
A stunningly beautiful album, A Stranger I Came perhaps but in the end a friend for life.
Ian D. Hall