Category Archives: Music

Ewan Macintyre/Herding Cats: On These Islands We Sing. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

On These Islands We Sing, it’s perhaps what we do as a group of people best, a call back maybe to when stories were passed down aurally, when the tone and the delivery mattered to rely danger, to show joyous delivery, or just to capture the moment in something other than in flat voices; whatever the reason from every corner, from Kent, to Cornwall, through Shannon, Limerick and up through the narrow inlets and shores that wind up to the Isle Of Skye, we sing because that what nature and nurture have taught us to do to show our emotions and our prowess in sight of all that have tried to quell our voice.

Ewan Macintyre/Herding Cats: On These Islands We Sing. Album Review. full post

(423 words, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

Michael McDermott: Flowers From The Graveyard. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

A wordsmith never confines themselves to the sorrows of the sentence, especially when there is joy to be explored in a paragraph, when the page opens up before them and reveals undaunted freedom; it is the same for all who are adorned with the cynical eye of belief in art and the ability to convey meaning with a poetic heart.

Michael McDermott: Flowers From The Graveyard. Album Review. full post

(369 words, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)

Queen: Threefold Identity. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Legends never fade away, they are just forever always in our sight, never releasing or letting go of the magnetic hold they have over our hearts or our souls.

Even when the studio albums finally cease being recorded, when the time comes for them to call it a day, when even the upsetting reality of Time’s passing shadows breaks the band apart due to a member leaves for the next adventure, there is always the opportunity for the fan to delve into the new release thanks to old gigs having been recorded from the radio or surreptitiously by the lone wolf at gigs who took advantage of weak security and then became the hero of the hour when those tapes became legitimate and sacred.

Queen: Threefold Identity. Album Review. full post

(505 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

Tripwire: Faceplant. E.P. Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Salisbury is known for many things, its looming gothic cathedral, the birthplace of Star Ward legend Anthony Daniels, Lord of the Rings star John Rhys-Davies, the incredible writer C.J. Tudor, its proximity to the neolithic Stonehenge and the pre-medieval society of Stonehenge and being the setting in a fictionalised form of the city in the novels Colony and Underneath.

Tripwire: Faceplant. E.P. Review. full post

(369 words, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)

Ady Johnson: Under Gainsborough Skies. Album Review.

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.

Ady Johnson: Under Gainsborough Skies. Album Review. full post

(398 words, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)

The Durutti Column: Renascent. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It could be argued that by listening to, seeing, or actively taking part in art, the emotion experienced can lead to what is felt as a kind of rebirth, that first time we sing either something of our own creation or just projecting a few words into the air that surrounds us of that which has once caught our attention, the moment we step on stage and handle with care the words that frame an expression or break another’s heart, that is the moment we undergo a kind of transformation, a first breath in which the soul becomes more than a lump of clay, it becomes active and human.

The Durutti Column: Renascent. Album Review. full post

(387 words, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

Roberta Smith: Humdrum Five. E.P. Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It might seem like a sense of discordance when we think of pathos and humour as being emotionally tied, aligned by words of opportunity and direct opposition, but tragedy and time are more than friends, they are the Muse to which we seek a truth, that everything in life can be found to inform, enlighten, and provide comfort…pathos and suffering, humour and wit as one.

Roberta Smith: Humdrum Five. E.P. Review. full post

(323 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

The Mike Jacoby Electric Trio: Welcome To The Family. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Upbeat and dramatic, without losing itself to grandeur or flippancy; that is the sense of urgent cool delivered by The Mike Jacoby Electric Trio as they blend a sharp view of modern Americana with edgy Country melody and the fierce boundary smashing grit of 90s realism in the exultant clash that is Welcome To The Family.

The Mike Jacoby Electric Trio: Welcome To The Family. Album Review. full post

(428 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

Kate MacLeod’s Mind The Gap: Home Brewed. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

For the masses this side of the Atlantic, West Virginia is perhaps a remanent of the old romantic notion of what the United States of America was once a representation of, a state carved out of its own seceded ideals from something larger and because it wanted its own vision, its truth to be plain and easily forged. Like the revolution guns that started on Boston Common and the and the anger of tax imposed by a grander authority, what West Virginia means to those who live without this purpose cannot be easily defined but the music that holds the beauty together is one of unshakable cool and distinct authority.

Kate MacLeod’s Mind The Gap: Home Brewed. Album Review. full post

(426 words, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

Professor And The Madman: Dreamworld. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

A Dreamworld becomes reality when we find something that pricks the bubble of indifference and we see the blood of its creator spill into our hands as inspiration, the ideas, the flow, the passion, and perhaps the madness becomes alive; no longer delivered in forced rainbow overtones, no glorious technicolour, just a statement of intent, of powerful, and fascinating, direction.

Six years after the acclaimed Séance was released, the quartet that make up the renowned Professor And The Madman return with a gloriously weaved recording that not only smacks the uneven layering of indifference till it blurts and tantrum induced meltdown occur, but it also places the trivial and cold irrelevance into the bin of life, grinning with positivity as it does so.

Professor And The Madman: Dreamworld. Album Review. full post

(378 words, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)