Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
No matter what, fans of Beverley Craven will always have the near perfect image; the sound of a beautiful and sensuous voice embraced so hard around their memories that not even a fairly average album could shake their belief in her. Which is good, for Beverly Craven is one of those artists that you want to love, that you want her to take you by the hand and lead you down many roads and personal alleyways in which have made her music so enticingly intimate and friendly down the years.
However some artists should have the suggestion put to them that five years away is far too long, things change, including the muscle that drives our innermost desires and thoughts. The heart may linger long in the frozen wastelands on the memory of past loves but its chilly wind and vicious bite soon pushes you into the warmth of another and no amount of Change of Heart can in the end rectify the situation.
The problem can arguably be placed upon time, too long away from a studio or releasing material means that the listener only has the past to draw upon, the mental image ruffles badly with the subconscious and the listener can believe that the artist still sounds like they did five years ago. Come a new album, come the pregnant expectancy going the full musical term and the shock can be on the scale of a small earthquake rumbling deep under the nearest town to you, it might not directly affect you but you can hear all the alarms going off in the area.
Change of Heart still has that verve that marked out Beverley Craven out as an artist of great repute but it also feels as though for the vast majority of time that this wonderful woman is going through the motions, that the belief in the lyrics she always had has now been replaced by the feeling of hurtful regret. She still causes the heart to flutter but it’s no longer, at least for this album, constant.
There are a couple of songs in which you know the energy flowed with the same positive beauty as listener’s would hope for but they are too far apart to have the spiritual momentum thrust the album into a different place. If the whole of Change of Heart had the attitude of the songs You Never Did Love Me, the re-recording of Memories and Just Be The Man, then Change of Heart would have been a lot easier to get into and one in which to revel in the melancholy on offer.
Nothing lasts forever, you do hope though that Time can be tamed for a while to bring something back from a gigantic edge.
Ian D. Hall