Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
There on occasions, admittedly as rare as finding that the speck of dust that you thought you had been seeing in the corner of the lens of a telescope is in actual fact a new star blazing away in the Universe, that an album will come along, announce itself with sincerity and then stomp over everything you knew. Not only will this action be like running at top speed into a stationary elephant but you will welcome it in to your life as if nothing else matters.
Temperature Rising by Danny Bryant is an album so packed with sounds, guitar riffs that would make an angel blush at the thought of sheer elegance being allowed to exude so much passion and the Devil stand by with a hose just in case the angel decides Heaven just doesn’t hold a future for it. The lyrics would make a dramatist throw their hands up with despair and fury at being beaten to the punch and it’s safe to suggest that Danny Bryant really has delivered on every single count in every way possible on Temperature Rising.
Runaway trains inflict less damage on the human condition that the scale of enormity in which Danny Bryant has somehow conjured up on the songs that reside at the heart of this, arguably the man’s finest ever work. Each note a mixture of Faustian pact and sheer mettle, of sanctioned smoothness to a guitar that screams with the delight and lust of receiving such treatment, it is as if everything has come together at the right time and the guitar is not just on fire but is in serious danger of closing down air-traffic control over much of Europe.
From the blistering opening of Best Of Me, through track such as Nothing At All, Together Through Life, the album title track Temperature Rising and the obliterating ending that kicks down doors with just a tap of the big toe in Guntown, rarely will a music lover feel so wonderfully exhausted and spent as they will after hearing this album for the first time. That exhaustion will need to have treatment for the play button on the stereo is never too far out of reach to be flicked again.
In a year which has seen Blues rise to the top yet again over many of the other genres, to have Danny Bryant release this type of work is exceptional. A masterpiece!
Ian D. Hall