Arrow Highway, Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Listening to music in the comfort of your own home is an enjoyable way to take in the thoughts and words of an artist, the soothe reassurance of what is familiar surrounding new music is tangible and concrete. Some albums though need the experience of being heard whilst you are out in the open, away from the confines of four walls and being urged to take the imagination by the hand and showing it a different way of life, an image to hang the music onto. This way of looking at music works wonderfully well especially when it is a pure and defined set of instrumentals as Mike Chylinski’s new project Arrow Highway.

Thom Morecroft, Moon Moon Shake It. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

If all roads lead to Rome, then does the River Mersey beckon with its delicate welcoming sound of its history and people and toss and crash of its deep blue water for musicians far and wide to take residence beside its shores and bring something of their talent and then infuse the artist’s natural gift with something solid, something incredible? Many it seems are called to Liverpool, countless are even chosen and the city of absolute culture embraces them, for Thom Morecroft, a man from the wilds of Shropshire, and his album Moon Moon Shake It, it seems that enticing wink from the Mersey has captured a man who will not let anything stand in his way.

Tragedian, Decimation. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Decimation, either a slaughter or annihilation, a battering of the senses in which the only chance you have of salvation is keep on playing the album until you work out exactly why the new album by German Power Metal band Tragedian seems so formidable.

Reuben Archer, Personal Sin. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Reuben Archer’s pedigree stands before him like an outstretched monument, adorned with the knowledge that it symbolises something extra, that little piece of musical ingenuity that many strive for but just fall short of. It also takes an incredible talent to pull the amount of superb guest musicians to perform on his debut solo album and when you have the supreme gift of genius as Magnum’s/Thunder’s Harry James, Status Quo’s John ‘Rhino’ Edwards, Neil Murray, the great Luke Morley and Paul Raymond on the album, then it’s not so much as a Personal Sin, but a statement of special intent.

Marcella Detroit, The Vehicle. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Albums come and go, pop stars appear and disappear with frightening regularity and yet the artist digs away at your soul with a kindness and sincerity that those who litter the charts of popularity can probably never hope to achieve. The artist stays in the listener’s heart and makes themselves at home forever. Even with a large distance in time between albums, what comes along can be thrilling, soulful and takes the listener on the next stage of their life hand in hand with them.

The Lone Ranger, Film Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Johnny Depp, Arnie Hammer, Ruth Wilson, William Fichtner, Tom Wilkinson, Barry Pepper, James Badge Dale, Helena Bonham Carter, Mason Cook, J D Cullum, Saginaw Grant, Harry Treadaway, James Frain, Joaquin Cosio, Damon Herriman, Lew Temple, Leon Ripley, Stephen Scoot.

Robin Beck, Underneath. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

In days when the abhorrence of misogynistic verbal sexual barbarity seems to be making a very unwelcome and unpleasant come back, Robin Beck and her latest album Underneath shows that no matter how some might try, you just cannot keep a good woman down.

Caves, Gig Review. Zanzibar, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

To a generation born in the 1970s or before, Sunday afternoons were always consigned to the part of the week labelled most dull, it was the time of the week that came after the fun and revelry of a Saturday night and the near horror of an ever encroaching Monday. It was time for a walk to somewhere there was never open, for people to have a Sunday nap after dinner with the family or if they were really fortunate, being asked to do something in the garden or even painting the window frames.

Steve Thompson And The Incidents. Gig Review. Zanzibar, Liverpool

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Like many things in the world, music is an art form best enjoyed live and in the raw, not force fed down a multiplex of wires and accessible via a flick of a switch and shown on a screen with directors teasing you into believing that what you are seeing is real. Catching a band live allows a sense of belonging to something a little more than yourself and in Steve Thompson and The Incidents, alongside the millions of other bands plying their trade with a smile and a song that belief is more than real, it is realisation that art in the raw is as good as it gets.

Billy Joel, An Innocent Man. 30th Anniversary Retrospective.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

For anyone in the U.K. or Europe who loved their music to have an American twist then the Summer of 1983 saw Billy Joel, one of the biggest music artists ever from the United States, have perhaps arguably the most commercially incredible time of his career to date as he released the stunning An Innocent Man onto the music world.