Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
These are times of illusion, confusion and stagnation, everything is moving at a pace of change in the way the daily slog dares not imagine, the sense of disproportion is damaging. For these are Dark Daze, staggering shock, constant calls for clarity, and ones for the poets to search out their own reasons to dispel the coming storm, to add a voice of harmony so that the clouds roll on past and that evaporate, like bad dreams, in the emerging sun.
Dark days instigate a dark daze and the only response to the upheaval and mayhem is to add as much light and sound to the atmosphere as possible, to crank open a sliver of proportion in the sheet of grey and hope that your strength is enough to start a new topic of conversation and promise; that the daze is replaced by lucidity and clarity of determination and action.
It is the action of Mike Blue and his new album Dark Daze, that the topic for the year could see a difference, that in amongst the calls for soliloquies and doom, there is a joy, a cry for delight to be had and enthuse the memory of life into action. For that is exactly what Mike Blue inspires, the groove of melancholy as a weapon to believe in enthusiasm and rhapsody, whilst handling the responsibility of pleasure with absolute passion.
Across tracks such as Before The Rapture, the excellent Colwyn Bay, the bitter pulse of acceptance in House of Horrors, It’s Better To Be Blue. Take Me (To The River) and the surprising, but nevertheless honest approach of memory in We Ain’t Kids No More, Mike Blue captures the zeitgeist of our time with feeling, and with drive.
Where others will play perhaps with the time, to manipulate the feelings and to measure out a false narrative, to force feed a direction in which others will uneasily comply with, Mike Blue performs with sincerity, it may be painted in melancholy, but it is not desperation, it is not sorrow or the excess of cheerful forgetfulness and modern vagueness, it is just honest, plain and simple creative beauty.
An album that is shrouded in the belief of its creator, Dark Daze indeed, but one that knows the potential of the storm can generate a different electricity to utilise and power our lives onwards.
Ian D. Hall