Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10
A rare treat in life should be enjoyed as much as possible, it is something that should also be viewed as being perhaps as unique in your life, collection or something that you desperately want to share with the world at large. It can also be felt deep down, in the fiery pit of covertness and beautiful secrets that the soul demands you keep, is something that you know you only want your own ears to behold; even if it for the shortest while.
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It is an almost inalienable fact that for the people that make up the islands and lands of Great Britain, water, whether in the form of the crashing sea that dominates the paintings of Turner, the gentleness of the stream babbling through country fields and pulling at the stems of flowers in full bloom or the mightiest rivers that cities stride alongside, the Mersey, the Thames, the Rae, the Clyde, the Taff or the Tyne, all are constant and as Paul Wilkes more than beautifully shows on his latest E.P., there is a River Running With Me.
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The world may be getting smaller but in terms of its output and the sheer abundance of music that comes forth on a daily basis, the expanse is such that it may be considered hard for many to keep up with what’s new, what’s available and what is to be seen as the dog’s own business.
For Blues that maxim is surely as true as it will rain at some point during the week and that the genre doesn’t get the ringing endorsement it is surely due in a world more and more obsessed with television programmes churning out singers who within the wink of a cameraman’s eye will be forgotten and mislabelled in years to come.
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When a band reaches fifty years in one form or another, the listener could quite rightly expect for Time to get the better of them. Time though can be fickle, it can easily be as nice to the passing of the seconds and hours as it can be cruel and waywardly malicious to the minutes and days that fall in between. As the time fritters past, it could easily subject you to ridicule and the rigours of slowing down, the steam not just running low, but barely existent, in your 20s and 30s and yet elevate you to a position of power and full of intrigue, deep fascination and adoration in your 40s and 50s. Such is the arrangement and accord time seems to have struck with the Scorpions and their new album, Return To Forever.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It could be argued that the world needs Black Star Riders like it needs to bang together the heads of those who are quite happy to stoke up the fires of war in the Ukraine. The chances of the latter happening are about as likely as One Direction suddenly throwing their lot into the realms of Heavy Metal, the former much easier to believe; especially with the band’s second album, The Killer Instinct, being unleashed and ready to destroy any doom mongers the planet is hiding up its rigid sleeve.
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There is a bind that ties the U.K. to North America that goes beyond the physical appreciation of its common and often misused language, more so than the rugged terrain and building blocks of democracy and historical values, it is the appreciation for the vast majority of times, in the importance of the two countries similar music tastes. Perhaps it goes further than that, it is interwoven in the thought of its ability to sow the seeds of its Celtic folk traditions to those over the edge of the Atlantic basin and the lost memories of the places that surround England, the beating conscious of artistic thought and the long established alternative view generated by hundreds of years rule from a pile of land that was once a monastery.
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The lands of Scandinavian thought might not come shamefully readily to the attention of the British public when it comes to being considered the home of great Rock bands in the last thirty years. However, raw and sublime talent keeps being unearthed and especially in Rock and Metal circles keeps pinning down the British contribution of late in a near one-sided bout.
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For the purists of such things, it takes at least a long weekend to get lost in the thoughts and melee that Amsterdam has to offer before time spent there can make the foundation of songs in which to be immersed in. One night surely cannot be enough, it’s barely enough time to find the mayonnaise at Schipol Airport for a plate of chips, take in the pleasantries that the cobbled stones provide the abundance of cyclists as on road entertainment or to savour the well founded truth that the Dutch are arguably some of the nicest people in the world and yet One Night in Amsterdam is all that is needed to understand that Ian Siegal’s second live album in under a year is an absolute belter.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Memories of our youth are perhaps the greatest we hold onto. They are the ghostly images in which form and shape the future and they are the ones that remind us of how far we have come. Youth though also works to remind us that every day we wake up and put our feet on the cold hard floor that we have a debt to owe our former selves and the need to better our position, spiritually as well as mentally, is burned into the back of a black and white photograph hidden somewhere in an insect nibbled box.
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Respect can come in many shapes and forms, some deservedly more so than others and in Dan Patlansky, respect arrives in abundance and leaves the same building swaying under the enormous adulation that has been heaped further still on the Blues guitarist from South Africa. That weighty expectation is further enhanced by the release of the stunning and outrageously gifted latest album Dear Silence Thieves.