Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It is the measure of a great talent that you can listen to an album that has been recorded somewhere in  deep dark confines, where lights flash on and off and with no discernable pattern emerging except for those who understand these things and for whom the rest of us may as well be watching a futuristic science fiction film starring William Shatner.  The music that is later heard from your C.D. player is one in which you can imagine fully having been painstakingly, lovingly and thankfully captured frame by frame, song by song and each bead of sweat that falls seductively from each of the musician’s brow able to tell its own tantalising story.

For that instant of sweat captured before it falls to the studio floor, before it has the chance to evaporate into the ether and forgotten, Zoe Schwarz Blue Commotion have delivered an album that contains such bounty, such rawness of the tempo and a cascade of emotions that it is no wonder that is titled Exposed.

Exposed is how the listener undoubtedly feels when listening to the Jazz/Blues Rock gems, exposed but not unprotected, exposed but not endangered, but more than unmasked as a fan of what comes from within each note from Rob Koral, Pete Whittaker, Si Genaro, Paul Robinson, Ian Ellis, Andy Urquhart, Carl Chamberlin and of course the sublime beat in the voice of Zoe Schwarz that bares more fruit than an award winning 1000 acre vineyard in the south of France.

Exposed takes that bounty and gives it purpose, the taste is sweet and with a hint of memory that takes the listener back to an earlier age. Songs such as Let Me Sing The Blues, If I Had Wings, the excellent Heroes, the overwhelming power and blissful realisation in I Wonder Who My Next Man Will Be and the natural delight in I No Longer Feel Blue and Smile all combine to make the feeling of exposure one not to be ashamed of, but one in which to revel and be content in.

For Zoe Schwarz and the musicians that inhabit the album like those guarding the secret of a vintage wine, all the stories involved can only be guessed at but the result is exactly the same, Exposed is not a weakness, to let emotions be ripened in the heat of the day and away from the cold confines of the studio is natural and uplifting, a hell of an album in which to remember the days of Billie Holiday for example is to understand life.

Ian D. Hall