Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

In The Past, it’s where we store the emotions and feelings that did us harm, that caused us to understand the nature of pain in ways that we fear will resurface and prove to us that we accept the tenderness of grief and the sting of self-reflection. We should never shy from the doors that lead us to the past, we should fear nothing from those wounds, for they teach us nothing short of the constancy in freedom in expressing beauty for that which hurt us.

Visions of such are sometimes hard to articulate but for Dan Ryan and Sam Shield it is one of fierce majesty, the union of vocal and instruments that feel haunting, a luxury, an impressive array of imagery woven into the tapestry of life and song, and it is in this past that whilst the measure is of one of reconciliation, the muse, the sound is very much of the moment, the continuous pleasure that places the song as one that tempers every era and time to come.

In a series of highlights of music that has its roots in the city that feeds upon the time and tide of the River Mersey, Visions Of Albion have constantly been one of the finest examples of the sense of purity that music, that art, provides, and In The Past is a track to be proud of, its rolling melody concentrates the mind and insists upon the listener that emotion is a virtue, it is a dynamic to hold and nurture, no matter whether it is in the past, the present, or in the distance, in the unseen future.

A track that has influence and understanding of stoicism but filled with the air of sympathy and arrangement completely through it; this is Visions Of Albion at their dramatic and empathetic best.

Ian D. Hall