Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The whole world is at it, even the virtuous and those who claim the moral high ground, from politicians down to all of us who increasingly reply, I’m fine to the question How are you?, it seems as though that Everyone Is Lying; we all know it, we cannot help it but the world would probably see revolution everywhere if we suddenly decided to tell the truth.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The young angry punk and rock rebel may have long since changed, morphed and become the sophisticated and worldly embracing lady of music, but there is always a twinkle in the eye of anyone who was blessed with the urge to rebel, to see beyond the straight and narrow and embrace the chance to witness the Wilder Shores that is denied to so many because they cannot sense how enormous or how exciting it is.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
The live album is always one that is steeped in the problematic, catch it right and it can stir many a fan into approaching the band or artist with a different perspective, a more suitable outlook of appreciation of what to expect between the void that stands between the polished material in the studio and the unexpected possible harshness of the constant glare in the venue.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The urge to praise the spectacle of the new day is something that runs deep in our D.N.A., the terrors of the night is the inherited backlash from our primordial days of soup and mist and one that cannot be denied easily; the salute we offer to the hopeful sunshine ahead is the inner thought of Good Morning Sky, the persuasive chant that might guarantee a nice day and the memory to hold close when night rears its head again.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A spoon full of sugar may indeed help the medicine go down, however, when you have the Sugarmen close at hand then who needs a remedy, you have the antidote to the beige and the dull right at your hands; no Doctor could find a better way to dispel the blues.
It is with the album Local Freaks that Sugarmen cement and build upon what is already a huge and surely unbreakable bond in Liverpool between band and gig goer, and to which can only make them one of the biggest influences to come as more people found out just how infectious they are to listen to and how they relish in the contagious aspect of their studio and live performance.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Time is the mystery that never reveals itself until the final moment; it is almost as if it has a secret desire to be seen cloaked in a black cape, twirling a 19th century melodramatic moustache and hitching up at the last moment to pronounce to the awaiting world that it was indeed it that set the wheels in motion.
Whether it be the inspiration for a novel, the first anticipated kiss under the moonlight with the one you have lost your heart for, or just making sure the fates collide and the wheels move smoothly under a band’s intriguing set-list once again; Time is always the hero and the villain combined, twirling moustache always optional.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The very name Gentle Giant evokes such memories that the sheer complexity of their music is one to always remember fondly and with a stirring beating smile that suggests without them, many of the Progressive bands we know and love today, might simply not have recorded their own offerings in the same fruitful manner.
It is to the past that the future often looks to and in musician/producer Steven Wilson, Gentle Giant’s sense of layered introspection, of the purity that each album strived for over the course of a decade, is captured and given his incredible technical talent the urge to once more digest so much of a band and give the listening public a sense of the dramatic that was lost in earlier productions. Â
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are many instances in which the tongue can reel off all that the Victorian era offered on a disingenuous plate was to the detriment of humanity; not the great inventions and breakthroughs in science and medicine, but the way that all it displaced suddenly became superfluous and got seen as the waste, the feckless and the easily controlled.
However for all of this and perhaps arguably because of the underlying guilt that such damning treatment of the living would have caused in some quarters; what it brought instead was a disturbing interest in the macabre, in the dead and those who were thought of as monsters.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Some will move Heaven and Earth to make sure that the voices that are ignored, those that question, those that probe beyond the polite enquiry, are heard. For to keep anything in silence, to bully someone because their point of view is different to your own, is a sign of the intolerable winning and no reasonable discussion or debate should be Hard To Kill with an executive order.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The clown, the comedian, the one who persistently smiles no matter what life throws at them, those are the ones in which we should hold closer than most, for in their laughter is the silent sound of unhappiness and sorrow; in their eyes is the hope that someone, somewhere, will take them by the hand and let them not be bound by the joke that everyone sees.