Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It is all about the delivery of the phrase, the way a request, a command, a warning comes across, that makes a person stop and listen, or get ready for the fight that so obviously is wanting to take place in the eyes of the one issuing the demand, it is the verbal order which is only one step away from the tap on the shoulder and the growl in the face. To capture that anger in art takes a different kind of emotion, one not steeped in the patriarchal feel of ownership, one that is convincing, a little bit more frightening, and one that if done right, is filled with the friction, the fire of seeing into the eyes of simulated toxic behaviour.
Dan Wilson’s persuasive voice has been feted, noted with great passion since his debut album release in 2015, and that exceptionally bright tone endures, even with his new single, Leave My Baby Alone, being one in which the situation calls for the art to lose itself in the act of frustration, of placing himself as the angry provocateur, the sweetness of expression replaced by the truth of ownership. The result is a thrilling British-crime like fascination in what makes a person change their emotions in the face of losing the one thing they covet more than anything.
We hopefully would never travel down such a road ourselves, but at some point we probably might be required to snarl in the face of a rival intent on stealing our love, our joy, the art that we have striven and sweated over in anxiety at night; it is not an unreasonable assumption and one that Dan Wilson’s voice, gravelly in its delivery, menacing with authority, provides perfectly.
Leave My Baby Alone, the call of anguish, fear perhaps, the desperate decline of our soul as it withers under the pressure of the threat of loss, we cannot help but revert back to animal nature in us, it is from that position of the final warned growl that we see just how far we can fall back into the animalistic habit.
A single of great conversion, one that matches the silence in the air that threatens to tear down governments, that brings revolutions, Dan Wilson is the great persuader of understanding any darkness in human emotion.
Dan Wilson’s Leave My Baby Alone is released on October 19th.
Ian D. Hall