Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The mind is more than just an organic machine residing in a structured collection of a bag of bones, it is the home of all our tales, the holding place for all the anecdotes, the comfortable legends in which we revel. The fictions that justify our actions, the rumours unfound and the narratives to the silent film of our existence, the mind is the safe in which The Story That Lived Here can be relived, explored, added to without anyone knowing that the script had been altered to make us look more of the hero than the villain.
To live is to either rejoice and perform, or to slink into the shadows, breathing, conscious, but not be animated, the story drying up as one would see of an old riverbed that has been deprived of water by the building of a dam; and if the story is not to be told then the implication of mental dehydration is overwhelming, consuming, and exhausting.
Better then to live the stories, to allow them flight to creeks and streams where they can drink and be merry, and as Ben Sures perfectly attests in his latest album, the alluring and graciously penned, The Story That Lived Here, life has many tales, not all of them our own, but we retell them with poetry in mind, with colour and exuberance, and as with any aural novelist, the framing of the central character is all important, all significant.
Across tracks such as Before We Had Sarah, Boring People, Library Ladies, No One Will Remember You, Father’s Shoes, and the album’s title track The Story That Lived Here, Ben Sures, alongside Scott White on upright bass, Rebecca Campbell on percussion, and Richard Moody on viola and mandolin, the story is intensely beautiful, often filled with melancholy, and the memories of a father who sadly passed away just a couple of years before.
We perhaps don’t listen enough, we allow the melody to dictate how we appreciate a song, but Ben Sures is much more than the travelling troubadour, he is a true storyteller, no subject is off limits, no character is neglected; the observance of all that goes around is fitting for a tale, and as the album progresses, as the sense of articulate narration is gifted to the listener, the beauty of stirred imagination is let loose, the picture is implanted in the mind, and that dry river bed, parched and thirsty, is suddenly refreshed by a deluge of water, the dam of indifference having finally been breached.
Ben Sures has once again produced an album of exquisite taste, a blessing in the form of music, and one to which each story has a home.
Ian D. Hall