Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There is always a time to de-clutter, to take away the excess, the pomp and circumstance and just go back to a stripped back version of everything, to listen to a set of songs that just play along with the idea of simplicity and high value.
To listen to Iain Till’s E.P Oh, Sweetheart of Mine is to take that feeling of the stripped back, to speak of a truth that sometimes gets lost in the mayhem of modern 21st Century living and to feel part of a connected world once more. Yet in between the gentleness of guitar, the calmness of a cello and subtlety of strings, played with an ease and sense of love by Stephanie Kearley and the unlikely additions that blend so well throughout of a pedal steel and accordion, there is a set of lyrics that deals with one man’s thoughts of darkness and the counterbalance of light and how it prays on the mind and a sense of longing.
It is these moments of absolute integrity that captures the listener and the combination of cello, accordion, guitar and unshakeable steel show what can be done when there is no rift battling away at a lyricist’s soul, just a sense of purity and serenity, the tranquillity of finding yourself lost on the moors and sitting down to find the road again but realising that sometimes the road is just not the place to be.
The songs, the title track, Song For Lennie, Fade To Black, Come The Morning and Cold Town, Morning Rain, all offer a way of leaving the road well-travelled, the ever greater pot holes designed for you stumble and breakdown and instead find a certain peace and feel once more the Earth beneath your feet.
Oh, Sweetheart of Mine is one of those set of songs that you find yourself putting on with the idea of finding time once more is on your side. A set of songs so enjoyable and lovely that you might find yourself taking a diversion off the road just for the sheer hell of it!
Ian D. Hall
Iain Till will be performing at The Brink on Parr Street, Liverpool on January 9th, 2014.