Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

If passion is your thing, if it’s the be all and end all and makes the nights hanging by an amplifier, dry ice clinging to your lungs like a wet December fog and a guitar playing a sweet serenade of honest love and toiled emotion, then the Keith Thompson Band’s live album, Snapshot of Reality, is one in which to count the ways in which to adore your love of music.

If listening to the 2014 release Catch The Fire makes the ears tremble with an excitement perhaps not felt since the first love of your life gently blew down your ear hole and whispered the immortal words, “I have got you tickets to the gig in town tonight, grab your coat”, then one stage on from that introduction to the world of Keith Thompson is to either find a local gig, or the next best thing, and not always then an option as not everything transfers away from the true point of a live gig, is to take in the recording of one and let the imagination wander.

The album shakes with the unexpected, like a tremor felt in a Wessex town which startles the gentle British reserve enough for letters to hurriedly dispatched to the Editor of The Times in place of that peculiarity which surrounds the first set of correspondence declaring that the first cuckoo of Spring could plainly be heard, it’s enough to have the album ingratiate itself upon you with a quivering vibration.

The album, taking in the best recordings from gigs in Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and the U.K., sees songs such as the excellent All My Friends Are Gone, Giving Up The Day Job, the near portentous Giving Up The Day Job, the well observed Who Says A Whiteman Can’t Get The Blues and a very good cover of Al Green’s Take Me To The River all being played with that single, unremitting beautiful emotion of passion. It is that passion that marks Keith Thompson out as a great addition to the collection.

Live music and delightful zeal, a winning combination in anyone’s book, a True Snapshot of Reality.

Ian D. Hall