Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The core of a good story is a truth that refuses to be passed over, ignored, or shunned by a society that sees only the value in what they can acquire and not what they can achieve.
A Storyteller worth their salt understands that, and by which ever means they convey their message of hope, reason or cautioning response to an existential threat, the way they show the world their truth is not just to be played out by the listener or watcher in the wings, it is to be retold, narrated, perhaps built upon, enlarged and given that extra depth to which the narrator and bard, the visual interpreter can seize upon and smile.
A story is the product of energy, a symbolic union between the mind and the soul, and to be able to convey such a fantasy, a truth of expression is to see that energy explode, the fall out of passion hopefully catching all it comes in contact with, and in Eamonn McCormack’s new album, Storyteller, that energy is joined by the sense of euphoric emotion and the beating pulse of one who understands how to take hold of a listener’s imagination and make it tingle, make it burst with the possibilities on offer.
A Storyteller is also one who is unafraid to show you their past and their soul, anybody can rely a personal anecdote, but it takes a chronicler of memory to delve between all that happened and then pull out the moments they forgot, to create a new world, and without doubt Eamonn McCormack is amongst the finest and Storyteller proves that assertion.
With tracks such as the opening salvo of emotions in The Great Famine, Cowboy Blues, Every Note That I Play, Cold Cold Heart and the excellent South Dakota Bound all chiselling away at the reserve of the listener, all carving their name into the stone of time and pleasure, it becomes abundantly clear that in a world that sees big business lauded and the cover of magazines dedicated to the so called rich and powerful, that it is the dreamers, the romantics and the storytellers that make life worth embracing.
A fantastic, electrifying experience, full of strength and passionate paragraphs and cornerstones of existence, Eamonn McCormack’s Storyteller is quite superb.
Eamonn McCormack’s Storyteller is out now
Ian D. Hall