Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Freedom is certainly the overriding emotion that comes through Red Butler’s latest album Freedom Bound, the liberty to do what you want as an when you want to; the only restriction is what your mind tells you is not possible, nor certain.  For the musicians that make up Red Butler though, Alex Butler, the stunning Jane Chloe Pearce, Charlie Simpson and Stephen Eveleigh, certainty goes hand in hand with assuredness of belief that weaves its way through each track on the album.

The hard sell Blues, the straight line of great musicianship coupled with a voice that you just want to listen to all evening. For Red Butler service on Freedom Bound is in the giving, the dramatic personae that comes out of Jane Chloe Pearce as if bestowed by Jove in one of his more sympathetic moods and adored by the other Gods, in the same vein that marks out Joanne Shaw Taylor, so Ms. Pearce can seemingly do no wrong, especially when the musicianship is as cool as leaving a fridge factory door open in the Artic and Polar Beers chipping the ice away to pour into a smooth Bourbon.

The songs on the album, including a rather wonderful indulgently slowed down version of Johnny Kidd and The Pirates Shakin’ All Over, get down deep and dirty, they catch a spark of life in the soul of the listener and compel the heart to try to ignore the deep satisfying music that comes across. If the tussle between good and evil is measured by how far you can be tempted, then Red Butler’s enticement arouses and seduces finer than being given the keys to the Crown Jewels and being told that a Beefeater will help you stow them into the back of your pick-up truck.

Tracks such as Pension Blues, with its bitter-sweet look at how those under a certain view being told to start thinking about their pensions when they don’t have enough to live on at the best of times, the spell-binding Hoodoo, River of Smoke and Last Page of the Blues all stand out as if being placed best in show and having a first being pinned to their puffed out chests.

Blues, unlike pension funds which can be stolen by Governments when the proverbial decides to play with a wind implement, never ages, and in the hands of Red Butler; just sounds sweeter than an unpopular Prime Minister giving in and going to find a shark to cuddle. Somethings are just too good to believe.

Ian D. Hall