Category Archives: Music

Hilary Scott, Freight Train Love. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The train is perhaps the mode of transport most closely associated with romance. Not the modern train in which style has been replaced by the uncomfortable pursuit of getting from A to B without ever making eye contact across a table and the small sign of an innocent smile breaking the ice, but the train in which romance and heartbreak go hand in hand, in which a long journey goes by in the blink of a friendly eye or in which becomes part of life’s own dystopia and the stuff of great rock, country or folk songs.

Hilary Scott, Freight Train Love. Album Review. full post

(408 words, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)

Robert Reed, Sanctuary. Album Review.

 

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Some moments in Time are so perfect that they almost defy anything or anybody ever repeating the experience. To try and ever emulate the goal scoring ability of Kenny Dalglish would be near impossible, to match the passion, madness, extraordinary beauty and intensity that Vincent Van Gogh bought to the world of art should never be echoed and such should be said of Mike Oldfield’s seminal and musically comprehensive work Tubular Bells.

Robert Reed, Sanctuary. Album Review. full post

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

Nicola Benedetti, Homecoming, A Scottish Fantasy. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Many issues or ideas live in the realm assuredly marked fantasy, they are kept alive with unhindered love but perhaps with a certain amount of sadness or melancholic abandonment, they wither, they die and are forgotten, only half remembered through the mist and freezing fog that clears momentarily upon waking. The sound of a forlorn piper heralding the start of another day without whimsy and the never achieved fantasy is where most dreams end up and yet in the hands of Nicola Benedetti, the classical violinist, fantasies are more than kept alive, and they are nurtured and respected.

Nicola Benedetti, Homecoming, A Scottish Fantasy. Album Review. full post

(476 words, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)

Philip Sayce, Influence. Album Review.

 

Philip Sayce, Influence.

Philip Sayce, Influence.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

You only have to hear the start of the gentle rhythmic hum of the guitar to know that what you are about hear is so close to off the scale that there hasn’t been a machine invented yet to take the enormity of it.

Philip Sayce, Influence. Album Review. full post

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

Mater Thallium, Abandoned By The Sun. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

There are very few things in life that are better than a detective story. The thrill of going down avenues and drawing your conclusions from the clues presented to you and whilst the likes of Poirot, Wallander or Morse are missing, the best kind of detective is on hand, the listener, who is privy to every detail in the latest album by Mater Thallium, Abandoned By The Sun.

Mater Thallium, Abandoned By The Sun. Album Review. full post

(447 words, 1 image, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

K’s Choice, The City Of Music Two. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

The humble compilation album can take many forms. In now what seems at times the dim and distant past, as distant to the younger generation coming through now as Sir Edmund Hilary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest to those growing up in the 1970s, the past when to have your say in music meant taking the pick of the songs you may have proudly bought or even embarrassingly hidden away due to the absurdity of the song and placed onto a C90 tape and perhaps even then handed over with much ceremony to the person you perhaps fancied, the compilation stood for something pure.

K’s Choice, The City Of Music Two. Album Review. full post

(641 words, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)

Ashestoangels, With Tape And Needles. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Albums can pass you by, as if you are not careful, can days, family and friends. Family and friends might forgive you, Time is as likely to absolve you as is it to climb aboard the Orient Express and order several cups of Russian Caravan tea before the train leaves the platform in a cloud of comforting smoke, so it leaves the album as the only one that is sure to pardon your stupidity completely as long as you find it eventually.

Ashestoangels, With Tape And Needles. Album Review. full post

(397 words, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)

Accept, Blind Fury. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Sometimes you just have to let the bull rage, let the colossus of the animal world snort and devastate even the most delicate of china shops in the cause of smashing a few plates. That bull, the beast that can rip open a refusing ear at 200 yards, stares out from the front of the latest, and phenomenally brilliant, album by Accept and the Blind Rage of lyrical fury and crazed wrath crashes through the barrier between stereo and thought and holds the soul hostage till it realises that anger is not a fashion statement; it is deep, honest and fruitful.

Accept, Blind Fury. Album Review. full post

(368 words, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)

King 810, Memoirs of A Murderer. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Controversy aside, of which there is arguably plenty, the debut album from Michigan’s King 810 is a monster, a Metal python waking up in a spring loaded battering ram with the biggest headache possible and an attitude problem to match.

King 810, Memoirs of A Murderer. Album Review. full post

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

Neal Morse, Songs From November. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The latest album from Neal Morse, one of the four maestros behind Progressive Rock’s Transatlantic, is perhaps one of the most personal of his entire career.

Songs From November has all the feel of a man making peace with the world, acknowledging the past and arguably all the faults, the successes and victorious accomplishments that a life can have but which can be viewed from a distance as being less than perfect as the true victory is in the surviving and what you do and how it inspires others. Neal Morse reaches through the songs on the album a type of reflective armistice, a lasting harmony between the thoughts of the past and the hope of the future.

Neal Morse, Songs From November. Album Review. full post

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