Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Just as others see a version of us that even a close friend wouldn’t recognise by its description of our emotions and attitude, so we ourselves are confronted by a thousand facets of who we are when we gaze in the mirror or when we are startled by our reflection in a shop window when the bad hair day is the least of our social problems.
Perhaps the only time we see a vestige of truth is when we can see the eyes of another looking back at us, for they penetrate the soul; and that is the last of the layers we must shed as we lose our skin and minds and the Dear Departed of what makes us, fades away.
Sam Burton’s second outing from the studio sees the a truth a emerge, that we are built of layers that some never wish to see, but which are the foundations to our sorrows and loves, our hatreds, and our mistakes, but because we don’t show all these conflicting emotions to all, those layers peel off in various, uneven stages, and so as Sam Burton’s beautifully endowed voice sings of lament and melancholy, we can feel the assured nature of regret as much as we feel affection in equal determined measure.
It is to the time we have all lived through that our loss and our soul bares the greatest witness to tragedy, and yet from out of that we can venture deeper, not just skin deep, but to the place where the soul and heart share the chambers of existence, and create subtle, unashamed, beauty.
Dear Departed is a sequence of songs that adhere to a regime of self-analysis, the outcome of which is pure melancholy, unadulterated, never regretted, and deeply satisfying across every track.
Produced by Jonathan Wilson, the sense of earning the abandonment is always close by, and as songs such as I Don’t Blame You, Coming Down On Me, Empty Handed, I Go To Sleep, and the finale, perhaps fitting brilliance of A Place To Stay gives the album its grand farewell; but only for a time, for as sure as lament returns, so the album will make its way back to the machine and be played for its sense of tactile strength one again.
A wonderfully insightful album, one concerned with keeping the soul intact even when the layers of humanity, of those facets of all that others see, are peeled away.
Sam Burton’s Dear Departed is out now and available from Partisan Records.
Ian D. Hall