Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

There is a special place reserved in art for the moments, the extraordinarily planned dichotomy that causes your brain to feel something entirely different to what your heart is focusing upon. It comes from the ability to paint a picture which has a beat a groove to it which feeds on the dopamine in the brain, whilst simultaneously imploring you to listen to the lyric, to fight the urge to feel the music and recognise the words of anger, lack of hope, and fearsome indignation contained within.

The effect is like placing your gaze on a beautifully painted Matryoshka Doll, you simply cannot contain the wonder and intricacy on the surface, but then you come to take it apart, and your mind must work harder to understand why the song leaves you both illuminated and buoyant on the on the outside, but naturally feeling the melancholia of reveal on the inside. It is a question of what matters more to your soul, an outward glow and repressed thought, or a ugly truth exposed that you are willing to go to war for to set the world right.

The mastery of such illusion is not confined to one or two people, but to all who have poetry in the hearts, and for Only Child’s Alan O’Hare, their second single of their forthcoming new album, the sublime …And The Band Played On, reminisces of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, of the contrast held and displayed by William Blake in Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience, abound as the natural tendency to see the joy rather than the pain rears its head.

The innocent projection cast by the music is enough to have the heart swing, but it is to the lyric, the indisputable eye of the wrongs, the evil cast upon the working class since the slaughter, the carnage at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester two hundred years ago and through the ages where miners have come underfoot of the rampant seizure and destruction of their jobs and their family happiness, that in the end the illusion of the music soon passes into the eternal ether and is replaced by a sense of pity and rage of how we view the world when it we finally break the kaleidoscope and shatter the charming patterns others wish us to behold.

A track of genius, a song that Only Child could have presented to the public in such a way that it inflames the dopamine and puts a hold on the heart, sheer poetry, a song of innocence and experience.

Ian D. Hall