Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The deep belly of the blues always manages to find its way beneath the armour plating many put up to deflect its influence. The placing of that somewhat heroic but ultimately flawed shield is wasted though as quality always finds a pore, a chink in the armour, in which to erode away the feeling of the uncertain and suspicious.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
For anybody who has indulged their music whims, the caprice of cerebral cornucopia that flows from the heart of The Mono LPs live set, the cry of where is a C.D. in which to revel alongside at home has been a vexing one. Thankfully, as with all things, time rewards the patient, it offers the chance to get deep down and logically dirty with a band who are one of the major reasons in which to play great quality music in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Just one song from what could be considered a masterpiece of lyrical writing and a musical high, and even then the song that brings it down a notch is rather good, it just doesn’t fit into the album as a whole. For Theory of A Dead Man arguably won’t mind at all, not after bringing out perhaps the best recording in their history, the mind shattering and explosive Savages.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There is a new rage in town, one that sits beneath South Africa’s iconic Table Mountain and lets its musical thumping, beast like savagery and calm collected intelligence seep out across the sea. For Octainium there is better rage than what a set of guitars, the unmasking of a set of drum skins and the growling harmonic bass and vocals provides on their album Suffer The Clock.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Not even music can be serious all the time, why would it want to be? Everything needs a lighter side and music is ripe to have the light shone that little deeper than most. Cinema and theatre may rule the roost when it comes to placing a smile on people’s faces but music also has the unerring ability in which to have great music with a quirky edge and absurdly good narrative attached to it; it might not be what you are expecting but it works.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Broken Three Ways they might be, however there is nothing fragmented or faulty with the Wirral band’s debut album Return To The Shack.
This punchy force of nature with a sly knowing grin attached album is a breath of fresh air in a world that at times seems to have forgotten what Ska and Punk was about. Whilst Ska especially might not be the first thing you think of when the term the Wirral comes up in conversation, Broken Three Ways address the discussion in waiting head on, the banter that steams into view of comparisons with the likes of The Selecter uppermost on people’s thoughts. There is no comparison worthy of placing before them though, except that they both sound incredibly awesome, it is the only comparison that should be mentioned.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating *
Evolution is a wondrous event to behold, revolution can, in part, be just as thrilling; especially when it means the old guard whose ideas have come to a natural end are swept away. To place both progressions into the same album though can seem as though for some, that the world has been turned upside down and that Progressive has just a little bit of its enormous and well-meaning heart.
Yes, arguably the long standing Prog Rock band still going from the initial burst of creative freedom in which Prog bought to the world, somehow have possibly released the worst record of their sustained career.
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.