Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9½ /10

The third album by The Riotous Brothers, The Tree, starts like a feeling of pure exhilaration and ends up with you wanting to weep for all the right reasons and take each song to your heart. If an album can really take you to places that you cannot go to in your physical life then this is the same sensation you might get when you read Wuthering Heights, Far from The Madding Crowd, Moby Dick or Edward Rutherford’s Sarum for the first time in the quiet slumber of deep forest surrounded by the dying embers of a perfect summer’s day.

This new original set of songs from Mash Sonnet, Paul Long, Matt Lake and Dirk Maggs is illuminating, it asks gently for attention and gets it in droves, there is no need to shout, holler, exclaim wildly that it is a good record. It knows; it fully understands how the listener is going to feel once the music stops and will be there to greet them with the largest hug possible. The Tree that sits in the middle of the deep forest, the Blues family ever growing, ever tantalising, has found a branch so lush, so brimming with delicate bounty that it might just knock anything that the great Joe Bonamassa or Joanne Shaw Taylor can bring along to the Blues Jungle this year.

This though is not a branch that is out of reach, it is obtainable, easy to understand and fruitful. The Tree may well blossoming, it may well be growing exponentially but this particular limb is one that will keep growing for many years. Tracks such as the gorgeous Second Time Around, the excellent Something’s Got To Change and the utterly absorbing Cigarettes are songs of distinction, true treasures in which to immerse yourselves into and wallow for a while. Let the evening dusk give way to night and the creatures of the darkness have their time, you won’t notice them but come morning, when the dew settles around you, you will see another leaf on the branch, it will be your admiration for an album of absolute stunning beauty and breath taking originality.

Ian D. Hall