Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If there is a plan, a grand overarching scheme, a blueprint with the answers placed with pain staking precision, then for the most part, the overwhelming majority of humanity has not been told or made aware of its existence. It can feel as though we are at the opening moments of Douglas Adams’ insightful Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the Vogan race inform the people of Earth that they had all time in the world to object to the destruction of the planet by lodging a complaint about the building of a bypass which happened to be on a Thursday.
Witticism aside, and perhaps the acknowledgement of our own failure to understand the universe at large, the constant question that our souls and minds attempts to answer, Where Are We Heading? is arguably only to be found in the hearts of the calculatingly ruthless and their sensitive to emotions counterparts, the artists and the dreamers, and it is to the latter that we should heed the warnings, the sense of love and determination to cherish the answers when they are found, and in Saskia’s new set of songs, that determination, the pleasure of opening a new found belief, is palpable and insistent.
Where Are We Heading, maybe a place to where we have no right to be, but if it is the company of Saskia Griffiths-Moore, then at least the sound of fears, our joy, our spirit, will have meaning, and alongside David Ian Roberts on guitar, Thomas Holder on double bass, Daniel Inzani on piano and Kit Hawes on mandolin and second guitar, tracks such Picture House, So Divine, If You Couldn’t Lie, We’re Still Here, Air, and Let In The Light are not to be seen as ethereal fruits hanging on the tree of knowledge waiting to be picked at, but instead are songs of strength, of personal vision and perceptiveness, and like an island that is revealed from the shrouding mist by a blast of timely wind, the exposure to the listener is one of disclosure; that there is something more out there than just the murky waters and the atmosphere of other people’s schemes and deliberations.
Saskia has always offered fresh insight, with this new recording she continues to be one who is aware, to be the one to take the listener’s hand and lead them to a vision in which they can carry forth; a musician of empathy, of kind appreciation for the senses of others…where are we heading? it doesn’t matter as long as it a place of thoughtful recognition.
Ian D. Hall