Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
If you have issues with the past and you wonder why today finds itself in your bad books, then to think on and wonder What’s Tomorrow Ever Done For You could be considered an act of folly, a reckoning with a time that as of yet doesn’t even know is coming, let alone the part it has to play in your life.
We either look to the day ahead with excitement, the joy of having made it through another twenty-four-hour cycle, or we worry ourselves into submission, laying awake at night as we mentally prepare ourselves for what ever the day has in store for; our minds convinced that whatever it is, it can’t be good.
We look upon the future with the feeling that it is already decided, that tomorrow is Time that has its own agenda, and yet we neglect to understand our own part in it, the noise and the joy we must offer in making the moment bend to our favour, we must be resolute, resistant to the knocks and disdain of others who see it as an excuse to utilise brutal words to brandish our hearts, and most of all we must remember all that the past gave us in terms of lessons and adventure and make the same offering to the time to come.
For London’s The Gold Needles, the power of the music makes tomorrow a period of pleasure, a set of songs, including incredible covers of tracks by The Beatles and The Hollies, that refuse to be ground down by despair and unfashionable belief, and instead offer a totem, an aural symbol of the timeless in the faith that the day will be as passionate and productively accepting as what has gone before.
Perhaps the secret of time is to know that it has stretched before you and will go on long after you have picked up your instrument and weapon of choice for the final time, and it is to long standing relationships that we often seek the faith in who we are and what we can achieve the most. For Simon Dowson, Dave Burbage, Carl Slaughter and Mark English, alongside guests Kurt Reil, Will Jones and Larry “Synergy” Fast, that symbolism of tight inclusion has meant that their album What’s Tomorrow Ever Done For You is one more future familiarity that of greeting the day cold and alone.
In tracks such as I Get The Pressure, Dead Man’s Hands, the superb Billy Liar, Susie Is Sorted (She Doesn’t Care), Counting The Days, Realm Of The Black Dog and the album title track What’s Tomorrow Ever Done For You, the foursome present with feeling of terrific harmonies imbedded into the music, an experience of having lived with Time as a binding force between them, not just making them sing from the same hymn sheet in this progressive psychedelic power pop play, but seeing tomorrow as a freedom that wants to be explored, to be seen as a friend yet to visited, not as a jailor who seeks further imprisonment for the masses.
A superbly arranged and delivered album and one that insists that you don’t ask What’s Tomorrow Ever Done For You, but what you can do for tomorrow.
Ian D. Hall