Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
The Terms of My Surrender, the new album by John Hiatt, is far from a submission, a yielding to an audience that has seen Blues once more become a force in the mainstream, with big thanks in part to the likes of Joe Bonamassa and British female star Joanne Shaw Taylor but it also doesn’t quite hit the big numbers that you almost find yourself willing to hear.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
You can listen to some people play live and know that the studio will not be as kind too them as what they sound like as they do in the raw, then there a select few that just fill the room with their life, their presence that every single piece of the being comes out and the seemingly random moments just become something so believable, so authentic and discerning that the microphone just wants them to play all night. Such is the emotion that a listener will get when they listen to Gary Edward Jones’ album The Cabinet Maker.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are times when the closest analogy, the biggest compliment you can give a group is to compare it to something from the past.
For the 286 and their E.P A Victory for the Battalion 286, to associate it with a solid piece of music from one of the finest bands from the 1960s should be seen as an honour and whilst the music fits neatly in the Power Pop arena, the E.P. goes beyond that and goes straight into the natural limelight afforded the heavily under rated band The Small Faces and the physical expanse that sits in the album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Freedom is certainly the overriding emotion that comes through Red Butler’s latest album Freedom Bound, the liberty to do what you want as an when you want to; the only restriction is what your mind tells you is not possible, nor certain. For the musicians that make up Red Butler though, Alex Butler, the stunning Jane Chloe Pearce, Charlie Simpson and Stephen Eveleigh, certainty goes hand in hand with assuredness of belief that weaves its way through each track on the album.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The seemingly quiet ones are always the ones that seem to hide the biggest uproariously delicious sound within them. Like a star raging away in the Universe, from a safe distance what you witness is the serenity of cosmic forces going about its business, atoms colliding causing life to function and yet go to a fixed point and the heart-beat of the Solar System is heard in all its furious intensity. Listening to David Jimenez-Hughes’ A Point In Time is very much like witnessing that star burning up its life force and radiating its warmth but without the huge terrifying Galaxy ending boom at the end.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
You can see why some people suggest that the Arts has no place in society, that the individual has no place in society and that the only way forward is for everybody to like the same things and they do it with a sneer and a calculated business-like mind…they are of course deluded, the cruel twist of nature that has taken them from seeing somebody’s worth by the art they create and instead only seeing what can be gained in monetary value.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are moments in which you can believe that you have listened to something that goes beyond the realms of the earthly, that somewhere something profound has come along and imbedded itself it at the very core of artistic endeavour. You just can’t help but love the sound that emanates across the few feet of floor between you and your stereo, between the speaker and your ears, a bond is formed and you cannot help but accept that music has moved you. Such a time comes in the form of Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar’s album The Call.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Life is worth fighting for; it should never be placed into the open ended furnace in which desire and thought are too readily disposed in the pursuit of the quick fix and the so called unwelcome. Even when something doesn’t grab you at the first attempt it should at least be explored at least another couple of times so you can at least give it due consideration. Nothing is truly non-descript or distinctly average and that goes for music at the best of times.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Songs of Drink and Revolution, something that has been lost, eroded in the lifestyle of the comfortable in the last 50 years, the chance to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with your brother and sister and bemoan the state the world.
The comfortable, perhaps through the lack of main stream national bands and musicians under a certain age refusing to go against a certain grain for fear of being labelled as something other than an artist with a social conscious, the comfortable being led down a path of least resistance with promises of everything today. Then there is Lizzie Nunnery and Vidar Norheim, who show that there is another path, a path laid down by the likes of Ian Prowse, The Levellers and Alun Parry before her, a path where Revolution is freely discussed and lauded.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Time is perhaps the greatest commodity that Humanity possesses; no other creature on the Earth feels its passing in the same way, by the ticking of the arbitrary clock, the machine that allots how you live between the tick and the tock and how you use up your designated heartbeats. Every other creature goes by nature, Humanity goes by the well-oiled spring and the belief that Time is to be conquered, you either use it productively or find that at some point life has gotten so far away from you that it has swallowed whole by the numbers imprinted on the clock.