Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The spotlight on Steve Logan should be shining so bright that the reflection we see in our dark glasses would be one of complete illumination and thanks for the music released in his name.
That is not a complaint, after all to be in Steve’s company is to feel as though you are in an elite conversation, and whilst you know it won’t be a select crowd for long, in the meantime what passes is a sheer and scintillating continued introduction.
That time though must come, and if the listeners find the voice to laud loudly then in the artist’s latest recording, Psych Ward, what will transpire is surely the household will have a name that will be as easy on the lips as an album is pounding on the heart.
The album has all the hallmarks of the undisguised epic, it is a tale born of disparate songs given a voice, the sound of urging freedom whilst understanding our own foibles can appearing maddening, and yet are perfectly sound when investigated deeply. Psych Ward is a pressure valve released, it is an antidote to mundanity and the mundane.
When an album starts of well you can be forgiven for holding your breath for the moment it starts to fall away; it is somewhat inevitable that this should occur; and yet as Rock Star Slideshow, The Sky Inside Your Mind, and Jesus Is My Vaccine lead the way in a chant of celebration of a music mind in full flow, so what follows is one of dramatic lessons delivered by a preacher of the fantastic and the soul of a poet.
With a mammoth sixty minutes on the clock, and with superb musician compliment by James Hargreaves and Nigel Elliott, the album never falters, and songs such as Dying In The Mirror, the absolute gem of Orwell, the unrelenting Shield of Achillies, and the album title track of Psych Ward, what is to be found is a complete arch of human emotions that dig into the heart, occasionally breaking the sense of surrender, but always delivered with sincerity and dream like fervour.
To have Steve Logan in your mind as you listen to this brand-new release is to know you have found a sense of nirvana, an attitude of the divine made clear. Psych Ward is the place where human emotions go to be soothed and discovered with charm and full of promise.
Ian D. Hall