Sugermen, Local Freaks. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

A spoon full of sugar may indeed help the medicine go down, however, when you have the Sugarmen close at hand then who needs a remedy, you have the antidote to the beige and the dull right at your hands; no Doctor could find a better way to dispel the blues.

It is with the album Local Freaks that Sugarmen cement and build upon what is already a huge and surely unbreakable bond in Liverpool between band and gig goer, and to which can only make them one of the biggest influences to come as more people found out just how infectious they are to listen to and how they relish in the contagious aspect of their studio and live performance.

Sugermen, Local Freaks. Album Review. full post

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

Milburn, Time. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Time is the mystery that never reveals itself until the final moment; it is almost as if it has a secret desire to be seen cloaked in a black cape, twirling a 19th century melodramatic moustache and hitching up at the last moment to pronounce to the awaiting world that it was indeed it that set the wheels in motion.

Whether it be the inspiration for a novel, the first anticipated kiss under the moonlight with the one you have lost your heart for, or just making sure the fates collide and the wheels move smoothly under a band’s intriguing set-list once again; Time is always the hero and the villain combined, twirling moustache always optional.

Milburn, Time. Album Review. full post

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

The Christmas Season Jumper.

 

The Christmas seasonal jumper,

knitted who knows where,

on sale, colourful,

advertised on line,

a few happy smiling faces

no doubt, a few jokes

and dig in the rib expense

as photographs are shared

in the immediate world,

secretly hoping to make it big

as a meme;

a Christmas jumper,

be it still September,

and sharing space

with the devastation

and ruin that has torn

Puerto Rico apart.

But it is O.K., Christmas is here

always early.

 

The Christmas Season Jumper. full post

(85 words, estimated 20 secs reading time)

Philippa Hanna Returns To The Spotlight As She Comes To Liverpool in support of Collabro.

 

Philippa Hanna, the U.K.’s answer to Taylor Swift is returning to the spotlight with her brand new album Come Back Fighting.

Most of her sixth studio album was written in Nashville, and she has brought together a range of pop, country and gospel influences, assembling an impressive collection of musicians. With features from B.B.C. Radio 2 presenter Paul Jones on harmonica, world-champion banjo player John Dowling and a leading U.K. gospel choir. Working with long-term collaborators guitarist Roo Walker and manager Andy Baker, the production has a fresh and unique flavour that won’t leave fans disappointed

Philippa Hanna Returns To The Spotlight As She Comes To Liverpool in support of Collabro. full post

(221 words, estimated 53 secs reading time)

Cast Announced For Wicked Flying Back To Liverpool Empire From the 7th March.

WICKED, the West End and Broadway musical phenomenon that tells the incredible untold story of the Witches of Oz, is delighted to announce that Amy Ross (Elphaba), Helen Woolf (Glinda), Aaron Sidwell (Fiyero), Steven Pinder (The Wizard and Doctor Dillamond), Kim Ismay (Madame Morrible), Emily Shaw (Nessarose), Iddon Jones (Boq) and Nikki Bentley (Standby for Elphaba) will lead the cast of the spectacular, critically acclaimed and multi record-breaking U.K. & Ireland Tour when it returns to Liverpool Empire from 7th to 31st March 2018.

Cast Announced For Wicked Flying Back To Liverpool Empire From the 7th March. full post

(618 words, estimated 2:28 mins reading time)

A Graphic Novel For The Stage As 1927’s Golem Visits The Playhouse This October.

 

A visually-stunning production is set to visit the Playhouse from 18th-21st October, as theatre company 1927 present Golem, a graphic novel bursting into life on stage.

Described as, “ground-breaking with strokes of genius” by the Daily Telegraph, Golem has toured as far as New York, Sydney and Beijing in previous years winning awards for its conceptual design.

The production is the creation of pioneering theatre company 1927, seamlessly synchronizing live music, performance and storytelling with stunning films and animation, posing questions about the about the digital age and our over-reliance on technology.

A Graphic Novel For The Stage As 1927’s Golem Visits The Playhouse This October. full post

(257 words, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)

Gentle Giant, Three piece Suite. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

The very name Gentle Giant evokes such memories that the sheer complexity of their music is one to always remember fondly and with a stirring beating smile that suggests without them, many of the Progressive bands we know and love today, might simply not have recorded their own offerings in the same fruitful manner.

It is to the past that the future often looks to and in musician/producer Steven Wilson, Gentle Giant’s sense of layered introspection, of the purity that each album strived for over the course of a decade, is captured and given his incredible technical talent the urge to once more digest so much of a band and give the listening public a sense of the dramatic that was lost in earlier productions. Â

Gentle Giant, Three piece Suite. Album Review. full post

(432 words, 1 image, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

Cradle Of Filth, Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness Of Decay. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There are many instances in which the tongue can reel off all that the Victorian era offered on a disingenuous plate was to the detriment of humanity; not the great inventions and breakthroughs in science and medicine, but the way that all it displaced suddenly became superfluous and got seen as the waste, the feckless and the easily controlled.

However for all of this and perhaps arguably because of the underlying guilt that such damning treatment of the living would have caused in some quarters; what it brought instead was a disturbing interest in the macabre, in the dead and those who were thought of as monsters.

Cradle Of Filth, Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness Of Decay. Album Review. full post

(496 words, 1 image, estimated 1:59 mins reading time)

Selly Park.

 

How long since you were on the map for anything,

small hamlet off Dogpool Lane,

squeezed between Stirchley, Selly Oak

Edgbaston, Moseley, and the Bourneville dark,

it is hoped

that W.H Auden drifted and mused along

the once leafy roads as he conjured

a rhyme of two along the Pershore Road

or dreamt of ducks at the top

end of the old potato fields

where children would force the Rae

to go round a makeshift dam.

Chinese Burn in make shift

Playground and the illegally drunk

Selly Park. full post

(154 words, estimated 37 secs reading time)

The Men From U.C.L.A.

Men in white coats, Scientists of the mind

Coming to take me away

to be fully institutionalised

I’ll have my own padded cell

and Savile Row straightjacket

liquid cosh to keep me Quiet

They will arrive in a non descript

Laundry van to disguise their activities

hidden in plain sight, denial plausibility

extremely clandestine covert plan

The Men from U.C.L.A.!

 

John F. Hall 2017

Permanent link to this post (67 words, estimated 16 secs reading time)