Category Archives: Music

Red Butler, Freedom Bound. Album Review.

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.

Red Butler, Freedom Bound. Album Review. full post

(435 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

David Jimenez-Hughes, A Point In Time. E.P. Review.

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.

David Jimenez-Hughes, A Point In Time. E.P. Review. full post

(416 words, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

Forthaven, Darkness. E.P. Review.

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.

Forthaven, Darkness. E.P. Review. full post

(377 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

Greg Russell And Ciaran Algar, The Call. Album Review.

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.

Greg Russell And Ciaran Algar, The Call. Album Review. full post

(379 words, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)

Rise Against, The Black Market. Album Review.

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.

Rise Against, The Black Market. Album Review. full post

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

Lizzie Nunnery And Vidar Norheim, Songs Of Drink And Revolution. Album Review.

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.

Lizzie Nunnery And Vidar Norheim, Songs Of Drink And Revolution. Album Review. full post

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

Shane Beales, Time. E.P. Review.

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.

Shane Beales, Time. E.P. Review. full post

(385 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

The Most, The Vinyl E.P. Collections. E.P. Reviews.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There was a time when the lands that encompass the Nordic sphere of influence weren’t, with one notable exception, particularly noted for their music output or inspiration on the twin cultures of America and the U.K. Every genre was met with the kind of derision that you expect from arguably self-centred dominant crop of major artists. Times change, spheres of influence move on, what was considered unattractive or just plain wrong can become the stuff of legends and as with Iceland, Norway, The Faroe Islands, Finland and Denmark, Sweden’s music has become something to savour, like the stunning landscapes that dwarf the fields, the lakes that capture the imagination, The Most are something to admire from a country that holds such things in the palm of its hands and nourishes them in a way that the U.K. at times seems to have forgotten.

The Most, The Vinyl E.P. Collections. E.P. Reviews. full post

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

Gramercy Arms, The Seasons Of Love. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

If you wanted happening, creative, inventive and artistic way of life in America during the late 70s through to around 1993, then like the period before the Second World War and the smell of Jazz oozing out of the bars on 77^th Street like a victory parade caught in the heat of noon day sun, the best place to go was New York City.

Gramercy Arms, The Seasons Of Love. Album Review. full post

(521 words, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)

Manic Street Preachers, Futurology. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

If the early part of The Manic Street Preacher’s career was an abundance of the brutal thought wrapped up in the assurance of a protection from four lads from South Wales then as the group have got older, as the more the world feels more insane and the feeling of being abandoned becomes more prevalent day by day, the more The Manic Street Preachers are needed to offer a light on the insidious, on the corrupt and corruptible and the need to understand that to feel angry is not just a feeling it is a right.

Manic Street Preachers, Futurology. Album Review. full post

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