Author Archives: admin

Toast Of Tinseltown. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Matt Berry, Doon Mackichan, Fred Armisen, Tim Downie, Shazad Latif, Cecilia Appiah, Robert Bathurst, Rashida Jones, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Larry David, Natasia Demetriou, Kayvan Novak, Adrian Lukas, Harry Peacock, Aiden Turner, Colin McFarlane, Morgana Robinson, Benedict Wong, Tracey Ann Oberman, Freddie Annobil-Dodoo, Nigel Betts, Jaime Barbakoff, Guy Coombes, Gina Bellman, Freddie Fox, Neil Hudson, Jennifer Armour, Bill Hader, Greg Canestrari, Caroline Hacker, Flaminia Cinque, Mara Huff, Hanako Footman, Stuart Milligan, Belinda Stewart-Wilson, Paul Rudd.

Toast Of Tinseltown. Television Review. full post

(682 words, estimated 2:44 mins reading time)

Gabriel Moreno, The Year Of The Rat. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Never mind the Year Of The Cat, or indeed that of the pig or the dog either, for in The Year Of The Rat great changes are audibly recognised, and it comes with a sweeping fascination of what is to surely descend upon us.

Poetry and music are intrinsically linked, not only through the obvious reasoning of their artistic Venn Diagram in which stars such as Leonard Cohen and Jaques Brel are admired, revered to a point where they are cast as human gods of their craft, but through the ability to communicate thought in such a way that they raise the mind of the listener to a place where consciousness is a doorway to the stars.

Gabriel Moreno, The Year Of The Rat. Album Review. full post

(465 words, estimated 1:52 mins reading time)

Drug Couple, Stoned Weekend. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

In a moment of time when human activity has seemingly stuttered, and been the cause of other species disappearing off the face off the planet in numbers that seem unimaginable, perhaps it is time that we admit that the way we have accepted political dogma and its paymasters has had devesting results on the planet, and on the way, we interact with it.

Drug Couple, Stoned Weekend. Album Review. full post

(437 words, estimated 1:45 mins reading time)

Lordi, Abusement Park. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

The music never wants to stop, and as part of the Lordiversity box set, why anyone would want the ideas to stem and falter, the feeling of theatre and back door music hall thespianism to halt at the point where the audience is now chomping at the bit in anticipation, and where the lady has not even arrived in a pre-booked horse and carriage at the stage door, let alone applied her make up and cleared her throat for the final curtain.

Lordi, Abusement Park. Album Review. full post

(446 words, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

Peter Cetera, Love, Glory, Honor & Heart (The Complete Full Moon & Warner Bros. Recordings: 1981-1992). Boxset Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is always so much more to a life than what we perceive on the surface. So much of what we do gets lost in memory, remembered for detail by some, half discussed by those who see the past as more of an explanation of the present than a moment to forget, we are perhaps the keepers of our own memory; but it helps if others also can find a way to locate the missing jigsaw piece which makes the picture whole, the one that removes all doubt that once we were capable of Love, Glory, Honor & Heart.

Peter Cetera, Love, Glory, Honor & Heart (The Complete Full Moon & Warner Bros. Recordings: 1981-1992). Boxset Review. full post

(601 words, estimated 2:24 mins reading time)

Magnum, The Monster Roars. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Adored by the fans, respected absolutely by the wider community, and yet even when The Monster Roars, it seems that Magnum, the epitome of Midland Rock for half a century, still find they cannot receive the recognition from all. They are not alone in this, but with Magnum, for the listener and the fan alike, it rankles more because of all quality recordings they have made, through the seismic writing of Tony Clarkin and the sheer colossal style and vocals of Bob Catley, Magnum are arguably not just Birmingham’s greatest Rock Band, but they are themselves the monsters who roared.

Magnum, The Monster Roars. Album Review. full post

(443 words, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)

Crosson, Live At The Orpheum. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

All the world’s a stage, and some truly understand what it takes to perform upon it…

The days of the rock arena, for some, are limited, the sense of testosterone excess is not in keeping with today’s cynical, even verging on the puritanical world where everything is catalogued by numbers, by the instant thumbs up, or the inevitable calls for cancellation because of the believed offense taken; and yet despite it all, the arena continues to fill, and those players, brightly displayed, the lights capturing the essence and well as the production, are there to thrill in every capacity possible.

Crosson, Live At The Orpheum. Album Review. full post

(530 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)

Queen + Adam Lambert, Live Around The World. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

The cries of targeted derision are heard, the whispers will continue, that it’s just not Freddie up there on stage, pushing the crowd on, cajoling, entertaining, enticing, flirting at every opportunity, and in fairness they are right, it isn’t Freddie Mercury, the symbolic frontman who wowed Wembley in 1985, it isn’t the vocalist who brough tracks such as Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You to life as crowds gathered in Budapest, Maine Road or The Rainbow, but nobody ever will be, and that is the point, Queen lives on and despite everything that could have gone against them, all the publications and those who decided they were finished, the truth is Roger Taylor and Brian May, along with the exuberant and funny, the dashing and the playful Adam Lambert have created an energy, that may not be quite what you want to hear, but is certainly what you need to experience.

Queen + Adam Lambert, Live Around The World. Album Review. full post

(597 words, estimated 2:23 mins reading time)

Hollis Brown, In The Aftermath. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

If you are going to make a statement then it must be done with absolute conviction, it must startle the recipient, it must oblige the senses in to feeling the seismic change in shift and balance that accompanies the natural and the atypical alike; for only In The Aftermath can we see the devastation and witness the rebirth of cool, of groove, and of brilliance.

Hollis Brown, In The Aftermath. Album Review. full post

(467 words, estimated 1:52 mins reading time)

Pet Needs, Fractured Party Music. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Punk never died, but it is fairly obvious that someone thought it could be packaged, stamped, and sold as the music for all, when the truth is it sits in the soul of the fractured, the damaged, the creative, and the doggedly unrepentant as a singularity, as an offering to the mind that cannot, or will not be tamed, the mind that knows that anger, as John Lydon was to remark, is an energy, one that is constant and driven by the view of the world that refuses to be bought.

Pet Needs, Fractured Party Music. Album Review. full post

(480 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)