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.
Following on from their debut album, The Queen’s Lover, Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar have created something that sparks the machinery to life and places the brightness from the strongest lighthouse in a sea of tragedy and with a certain nimble grace, casts the shadows out and away from the jagged rocks of degradation and makes life just that little more safe.
The Call of the tender, the wild having retreated in the face of a superior force, always has the force of anger at its root but played with more guile. The vocals on songs such as the beautiful Roses Three, Royal Comrade, Absent Friends, Away From The Pits and A Season in Your Arms are as hauntingly beautiful as seeing the ghost of your long forgotten lover puckering up for a romantic kiss and holding their arms out to catch as you fall for the non-corporeal charms once more.
In terms of folk music, The Call stands amongst the very finest of the genre with some aplomb, its soft guitar soothing nature is a delight to wallow within, the fiddle supplied with refinement by Ciaran Algar is only matched in the poise of Greg Russell’s tremendously strong vocals to make an album of true worth. An album in which might pass by the vast majority, but those who look for the shimmer of light from the far off lighthouse, the light that shows the way past the dangers of a life without care, will surely be thankful for what they find.
It does all depend on how you listen for the sound of The Call.
Ian D. Hall