Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
To possess a gypsy’s soul within reach of your beating heart is to understand that emotion, the free spirit, and the individual is what separates the straight jacket ties of the conformed traditional from the beauty of freedom and unpredictable independence.
The emotional pull of the life of the gypsy is not for everyone, some will deny its existence, some will vary between the romance and the uncomfortable truth of agreed orthodox behaviour, and some, no matter how hard they persist, will never be able to give in to the pull of the belief because they are terrified of being labelled part of the counterculture.
A Gypsy Soul in the hands of someone such as Mark Sebastian D’Lacey however is one that exemplifies the romance, the progressive, and the modernism required to take on a project and bring it to life, to give it blood, to allow it to the freedom to take a turn when it was least expected, and defy the convention that traditionalism is the accepted way in which to make a journey of art acceptable.
We used to applaud those that saw past the customary canon, we would honour them with words such as maverick and unique, and arguably it is time that we did so again, and with the highest possible regard. For as Mark Sebastian D’Lacey shows, it is these people that make us sit up and listen, the individual who not only allows us to see past the velvet curtain, but who insists on revealing the warts and all of existence; after all it is not the made up glamourous who rebel, but the ones with stories of passion and romance to tell.
The four songs that inhabit the E.P., I’ll Be Missing Your Love, the exceptional The Teardrops In Your Voice with its noir like feel and smooth underground jazz heart, Oblivion, which has the superb Alison Crawford taking the reins of the vocals with her usual stunning performance, and the E.P.’s title track, Gypsy Soul, all combine to make this recording one of sublime passion; a romance under the starlight, the boundless and restless all together in one stunning E.P.
Mark Sebastian D’Lacey offers the listener raw beauty and succeeds in the nature of the nonconformist delight that surely, we should all be striving for. Outstanding!
Ian D. Hall