Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
We have become almost hypnotised by the sense of the quick reel on social media, the snapshot of a film, a conversation, a short piece of fan fiction given a human face…it reflects our capacity to ignore the long game, to allow the dictation of modern thinking that we can be amused for less than a minute before requiring shifting our attention to the next quick fix of pleasure.
That sense of attention grabbing void is the point of deflection, and we must do all we can to defy the moment by moment play…or alter the situation to our advantage by placing what is effectively the discarded and forgotten in a large blender and joining them together in a clever and ingenious way, something so unexpected that it catches the fans out, and then has them drooling at the prospect of a silent joy untamed.
A sequel, a combination, a piece of the Jethro Tull machinery that has been put together, sewed and glued with a dash of liberal thought and a majority of constructive belief…whichever way the listener feels to draw intrigue from War Child II as an entity or as a reminder that there are always moments that simply cannot appear on the original idea due to a multitude of constraints.
War Child II is the passion derived from the previously released Steven Wilson remix c.d., Warchild 40th Anniversary Theatre Edition Book, that brought finally all the music from a long abandoned 1970s film, and yet one that finally sees those forgotten, but certainly elegant tracks on to the vinyl format in their own right.
The additional War Child session tracks find way to be more than just a physical reminder of what was once missed, it is the separate direction that is almost film worthy in itself, a restored former edit on the sanctity on the warmth of vinyl that impresses as much as if it had been released several decades before.
Although the songs have appeared in various forms on other culminative recordings, to have tracks such as Paradise Steakhouse, Saturation, Good Godmother, Tomorrow Was Today, Glory Row, and March, The Mad Scientist, to have them on a single vinyl album is to savour, one to satisfy the completist of the genre, and maybe offer instruction to a modern society fixated on the single reel.
We move in extraordinary times, but some things perhaps offer a fixed point that can be moved by the adaption of a singular mind understanding just how fruitful music can be, and in which nothing is ever lost.
Ian D. Hall