Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The pragmatist will assert their supposed authority of the romantic idealist by deriding the thoughts they have as being unrealistic, out of step with the modern cruelty in which the world exists; this derision, this potential conflict in which the seer of what could be is extracted out of into an unsightly cold embrace, is nothing more than logic out of control. It is the unbalancing in which the visionary realises that not everybody speaks the same language and that not all ideas are welcome, that the prophetic stance in which the world requires the creative, is almost a sneer waiting in answer, to which Who’s The Dreamer? becomes a dangerously exciting response.
The realm of the Progressive artist can always be said to allude to the dreamer’s paradise in which music seeks to become epic, to stand on the shoulders of the blockbuster and the extravaganza, it seeks to be the costume drama in a field of reality television, and if done with purpose, if captured with ambition, it becomes a period piece into which the musicianship translates into the actors on stage and the scenery behind assuming a sense of the heroic endeavour.
This impressive scale of grandness has to also understand the ideal of humility and for Gandalf’s Owl, the full aspect of Who’s The Dreamer? soon makes its intention’s clear, its honour known. The album is not enquiring with malice on who is concealing the romance within their heart, but instead is imploring for the passionate, the impractical and the amorously tender to make themselves available so that new worlds can be created.
In tracks such as the two-part drama of A Dwarf In The Lodge, Between Two Worlds, Sunset By The Moon and White Arbour, Gandalf’s Owl search fruitfully for the optimist and the starry-eyed, it might not be practical, it could be fraught with vulnerability, but the romance of the occasion is overwhelming, it is worth the risk and one that must be seen as being immersed completely within the ambience of the Progressive world.
Offering the chance to be seen as vulnerable is alluring, the music of the mind always seems to be exposed to the point where it is raw, but in that rawness, Gandalf’s Owl is anything but helpless, instead the dreamer in which the album seeks, is impervious and imperious.
Gandalf’s Owl release Who’s? The Dreamer? on January 4th via Club Inferno Ent.
Ian D. Hall