Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The distance between our lives has got to the point where to feel disconnected from society is perhaps a prospect that many arguably feel. Nearly seven billion people on a planet and yet life can feel as lonely in a crowded, bustling and sophisticated city as it can standing at the very top of the world in which the only company is a polar bear with an appetite so large that it mentally makes a menu of your body parts.  What keeps us together in one form or another is music, it may divide opinion, one genre’s greatness in one set of senses is another’s form of torture, but it certainly unites those who see the devastating beauty in it.

In Last Horizon, another member of the clan of great rock music that can be found being harvested on the Wirral, the prospect of another uniting sphere of collective enjoyment is to bring a smile to the face, the motion of the heart beating wildly with excitement and self-imposed limits being smashed to smithereens.  Being part of humanity may be at times a lonely endeavour but if listening to Last Horizon live can stop that polar bear in its tracks, if being part of a community of fans who shake the root of expectation with such a firm grip that the rot near it crawls away, then the four young men will have achieved what they set out to do and with a composure and style which is just rich and bountiful.

As the Academy crowd recovered from the blistering attack on the senses that pounded and reverberated round the room long after Fear The Resistance had left the stage, the rumblings of what was to come started to dig deep into the reserves of all inside the venue. If Buckletongue were to send the crowd over the edge, then Last Horizon drove them to the precipice, handed them the bungey rope and cheered from the side lines, devouring a steak sandwich and waving them off with a rampant set of songs.

Opening with Colours and Forever and a Day, Last Horizon gave such an account of themselves that if Buckletongue are a future vision of what can be achieved in British metal then the four men are its co-conspirators, the ones allowed to sit as accomplices in the daring raid on the British public’s musical allegiance to the heavier side of rock.

With the remainder of the set being made up of the tracks Unconditional, Free Falling, the storming 3 Second Rule and On Top Of The World, Last Horizon are a band to be caught live, to breathe alongside and to beat at the realm of loneliness with passion, for how can you be lonely, even if for a short while in a crowd of people all thinking the same thing, that Last Horizon are a group of powerful musical persuasion.  

Ian D. Hall