Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

What lays beyond our vision is ours only to speculate over, we can hope, anticipate, even deliver inner peace with hopeful faith guiding us towards the place where memories are restored, where our life’s decisions, the punishments, the subject of our own mortality are reconciled and placed before us with the care and attention of an artist weaving beauty and narrative together in some kind of poetic tapestry.

Under Gainsborough Skies we find Colchester based guitarist Ady Johnson armed with the very thread of life that builds up the prospect of having the full picture before us, not just presented, but woven before our eyes, no detail obscured or left to chance in the background.

With a sense of the occasion neatly wrapped and a song list that explores the sense of the deeper infinite questions the listener will often overlook for the answers they find may disturb them, so Ady Johnson’s latest album, Under Gainsborough Skies, allows them peace in a truth offered, and it is one of tranquil repose, of faith in the note and the word that fulfils the inner peace sought.

Across tracks such as The Old Child’s Chair, the super O, For A time Machine, Swing By, Sleepy Dog, and Friends To The End, Ady Johnson, aided by Scott Matthews, Toby Bull, and Matt Simpkins, deliver through the eyes of that which humankind has long mused over, the ability, the depth of character to explore that which binds us, but also leaves us questioning our relationship with the universal, of pain, suffering, guilt, and Time.

It is a landscape of colour, where the light bounces off the lullaby of transition, of the visual made clear but also finding a kind of Folk gothic, not haunted and dark imagery, but in the deeper meaning, of the human soul remembered across time and space, in the window that refuses to be dressed and operates on instinct that looks beyond the gossamer and the manageable.

Ady Johnson’s new album is demanding but understood with pleasure, it is not made to be subtle, not dripping with melancholy, but an honest reveal of a human heart showing the world how it beats with sympathy and empathetic truth. Under Gainsborough Skies we find life can be more than a whisper, it can be discovered.

Ian D. Hall