Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Occasionally as a music listener you are transported to a place that is more than technically proficient, offers a finer sense of belief, and gives you a reason to smile in the darkness, one that insists there is a greater bounty to be found when we understand that being a casualty is a transience state of being, that we must be prepared to be vocal in our opposition to leaving the room silently, that in our defiant gestures we be certain to scream out Death To Mortality with all the fire of life we have ever displayed and forced out with that which is human.

Jim Pearson brings a value to the final days of 2023 that is unexpected and so wonderfully cool that it will dominate the mind of the listener for a long time to come, and one of the reasons for this truth is down to the absolute sense of joy that comes bestowed as a resonating, fierce pleasure that shows just how we should treat the great beyond, as a memento mori to the future.

Death To Mortality is enormously satisfying, it has humour strewn through out as though we are being instructed to see life as the bonus of astonishing trials and bewildering absurdity, and as tracks such as Other People’s Photographs, Trolls, The Boy With The Red Hat, and Save Yourself From Me announce themselves with vim and vigour, with an element of sarcastic panache, and the seismic value of a set of songs that inspire and push the listener to a point where the sudden urgency is left behind, that the arrogance of others is punished, and the lyrics are of poetic intensity.

Jim Pearson own take on transience is sheer and human, it is worthy of being an album that will make 2024 such a marvellous and entertainingly brutally truthful recording. This is how to grab the attention of the listener, give them show business dressed in the rattle of that which binds us all; for the great beyond is just a sidestep to another illusionary state of mind, and it is full of grace and dramatic style. Jim Pearson’s alive with his own offering of a momentous keepsake.

Ian D. Hall