Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Only when it is completely dark, do you realise how much you have neglected the stars.
Neglect is everywhere, in love, in decency, in hope, in time, it is the silence that accompanies the memory that we are so busy making sure we stay afloat, that we have forgotten to see the potential above us; and whether it is born out of destruction caused by others, or by our own feelings of damage, of desecration of the spirit by the darkness we allow to stop us from seeing others in the heavens.
It is more than a decade since the Lightning Seeds shone a light into the darkness, and yet the listener can count on Ian Broudie to create illumination where obscurity and shade, where the sense of perpetual night-time, has prevailed against the wishes of all who seek the well-lit expanse of unhindered dreams and movement.
See You In The Stars is the terrific return of one of Liverpool’s celebrated song-writers, and yet the album perhaps is only part of the story. Underneath the drama and emotional feelings of renewal and perspective over loss and growth in tracks such as Emily Smiles, Fit For Purpose, Permanent Danger, Great To Be Alive, and the finale of the album’s title track, See You In The Stars, what comes through is anger, fierce fury, albeit hidden with the delicate nature that the music has always stood for, at the betrayal that has unfolded before us in the last decade.
The loss of potential, the seething sarcasm that has been aimed at those with little to their name, that even when we prove time and time again that we are able to be what we aim to be, we are still looked upon as machines, robots, automatons dressed in flesh only able to carry out the actions of a system that honestly does not care, and never will.
It is that dichotomy of love and abandonment, of honesty in the public, of rank hypocrisy in the back rooms of others as they show their contempt, that is the stalemate we have found ourselves in between, and it is only with hope that we remember how to be guided by the lights above us, that we can dispel the bitterness as we look upon the face of our love and the guide that we can implore that we will See You In The Stars.
The beauty and rich belief never falter, and to hear Lightning Seeds return is, despite the realm of fear we must overcome around us, simply a blessing.
Ian D. Hall