Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
We have been denied much over the last five years, we live in a time when the fracturing of the artist’s soul has become not only normal, but lauded by those with an intent bent in destruction and chaos, and instead of taking arms against these agents of turmoil and manufactured confusions, we hide underground, our retorts spoken softly as not to offend the words of people we should not care of, we creep around the Abbesses of the Paris Metro, we slink in the darkness of New York’s Subway, just so we can be assured of not being accused of bringing love to a world of hate.
Such a performer that Liverpool’s Shadow Captain is, he is able to turn the tide on such thinking and has brought to the attention of the public an album of such outstanding beauty and empathetic discourse that each note sounds as if it has been placed in the hands of an angel, in the orators of history’s palm, and one that arguably, insistingly, maintains that Abbesses is Shadow Captain, the talented Stuart Todd, his finest album to date.
Abbesses is an exploration of the exposed heart brought to the sunlight and shown what it is to refuse other’s opinions, it is the unearthing of drama and intrigue, and balancing them together in such a way that each track is in itself a complex, but wonderfully expressive release that focuses on a particular essence of the way the area around Montmartre has been shaped, but also how the listener could see themselves as they explore the psyche and the feelings of the misplaced heart in history.
An entire album encompasses the tracks of Métropolitain, Toulouse-Lautrec, Satie à Montmartre, Belle Époque, Le Havre, Art Nouveau, and Fin de Siècle, brings such a greatness to the ears of the listener that it will be almost impossible to see past it as one of the finest releases of 2025.
The sound, the communication, the illustration of the dynamic and the vibe make it feel as though its grandness is the articulation of the ages given flight and the amber of the gods that look down from the sacred hill that overlooks Paris; and as they do so give thanks to the dream like power that the Shadow Captain has captured in one sweeping gesture of beauty.
An utterly outstanding composition, finery at its most exquisite.
Ian D. Hall