Category Archives: Music

Mike Zito, Quarantine Blues. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

How you spend time when you forced to be apart from all that you love, all that deeply care for, can be enlightening, illuminating… cathartic, and whilst it is enough to survive, that is important to endure the single punishment of isolation, the fear of collective worry that comes in the shape of humanity’s damnation, to strive beyond those Quarantine Blues and produce art, to seek guidance and passion from a place outside of the normal parameters is to arguably deal a personal hand of favour to others, to give them a piece of your soul so that they have their own blues lessened.

Mike Zito, Quarantine Blues. Album Review. full post

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

Darlin’ Brando; Also, Too. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Timely is the country that listens, blessed is the country that learns, whether it is from its mistakes, or from its humility in victory, a country that finds ways to be conciliatory and proactively willing to offer the hand of friendship to its enemy, can look itself in the mirror and say, we also too can add to civilisation and honour. 

It is honour and a special breed of insightfulness in observation that brings Darlin’ Brando’s latest recording, Also, Too, to the public’s attention, an album of musical glory and appetite, but one that also speaks volumes of how a low point in life can bring the change needed to gain a more enlightened perspective.

Darlin’ Brando; Also, Too. Album Review. full post

(405 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

Maceo Parker, Soul Food – Cooking With Maceo. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

When the joint is jumping, the heart follows suit, but it is the soul that is in command of the timing and the beat. The feast of music is enjoyed, the sound is respected, and it is down to soul, that inner being craving both peace and flavour, that cooks and brings fire to the very core of all who allow themselves to be captured by the sense of the exotic, and the rhythm of the mysterious and the mass musical effect.

Maceo Parker, Soul Food – Cooking With Maceo. Album Review. full post

(383 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

Robert Cray, That’s What I Heard. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

That’s What I Heard, the song that catches the fire in our in our imagination, or the scurrilous whisper which transforms in time to the unremitting, unforgiving rumour; there is a way to decern between the two states of conscious feedback, just look to the one with the sincerest voice and which praises with nothing to gain from having done so.

Robert Cray, That’s What I Heard. Album Review. full post

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

Barry Briercliffe, One Step Forward. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

One Step Forward, and a day, an album, a resonating thought at a time; the pleasure that comes from listening to a set of songs that you always knew was coming, and one that was placed in your trust from the moment the artist stepped out onto the stage and introduced themselves to a world that was unaware, unconscious of what was about to be unleashed.

Barry Briercliffe, One Step Forward. Album Review. full post

(417 words, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

The Furious Seasons, La Fonda. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Too often we write the songs, paint the pictures and recite the down at heel poems which reflect our own imagined lives, the sense of gentle conceit that surrounds us as we imagine that our lives are somehow worthy of other’s gaze and perception, of their interest; occasionally we might also draw the life of another into our artistic subconscious and present a part, a detail of their story, to allow their memory to live on after their death.

The Furious Seasons, La Fonda. Album Review. full post

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

George Sansome. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The emotional ties we keep hidden away in the attic, the items stored in boxes out of reach to all bar those with the humility and passion to climb a precarious ladder, are concealed out of sight for a reason, because whilst they remain deep inside the home’s least-ventured room, they remain safe and unscrutinised, they are the ideas that have yet to see fruition, yet to be placed on display, or relegated to the trash.

George Sansome. Album Review. full post

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

Shadow Captain, Hey Django. Single Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Bombarded as we are by the big picture, the rush of information and the knowledge that as one story finds itself winding up, another will come round and find ways to make us anxious, make us feel permanently on edge. An ever-growing cycle of news requires whimsy, someone else’s reflections about a love, a reminder that not everything in life revolves around destruction and mayhem, that occasionally, every now and then, you must acknowledge and embrace the news from the other side of darkness and take on, with a smile, someone’s pet love.

Shadow Captain, Hey Django. Single Review. full post

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

Brian Bordello, The Boris Johnson Massacre. Single Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Satire has reached a point, where for some, the idea is a caricature of its own self, where you cannot lampoon an individual of certain standing because it demeans the message they are trying to get across, the miles and years they have put into cultivating an image which is pristine and supposedly captures the best of us, that somehow suggests we have to fawn and tip our hat to them whenever they speak, pass judgement, make a noise but which in reality the public could use as a weapon, not one to maim but to prick the over inflated opinion and the pomposity of those that seek to rule.

Brian Bordello, The Boris Johnson Massacre. Single Review. full post

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

Non Canon, Non Canon II. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Being able to wear a mask to hide one’s intentions is considered dishonourable; the element of mystery is heightened by hundreds of years of pop culture where the villain hides their identity so that they might rob and maim with impunity. From the legends surrounding highwaymen, through to the modern-day equivalent of plastic replicas of famous people covering the face when stealing from a bank, the mask is one that brings out a certain boldness of deceit and the air of the mystique.

Non Canon, Non Canon II. Album Review. full post

(422 words, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)