Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Unlike an album which always gave the impression of being an event that was tantalisingly months out of reach, the single seemed to come around with near frightening regularity.

There was a heyday, an apparently glorious period of time which the single was lauded as the high point of the week for many, the chance to go out on a Monday morning, perhaps be late for the first part of school, but knowing the language that spoke from within the seven inch vinyl were engrained much more in your head than the imagined words of fools.

In the modern world, a single can come out and be lost within the melee of a million other releases within a day. It fights against so many styles that for many now the single is a by-product, more than the teaser of what’s to come and certainly not the money making exercise that it seemed to be in the 80s excess when a band would put out half a dozen songs from an album and therefore keeping the money pouring in. What perhaps has happened then is a more truthful approach and in Natalie McCool’s latest single Pins, that truth, that expression of reality is given the air of legitimacy that was missing throughout the previous decades of work.

Ms. McCool isn’t the only one but Pins hits home, it tears at the surface of the reserve and rips open a moment in time of the nature of performance, of relationships and the sheer waste that some people have to go through when pushed by outside influences and people’s expectations. Pins are not always safe, they prick at the conscious, they draw blood and exact some sort of dramatic vengeance but in the smallest detail and if the listener wants detail then in Natalie McCool, detail is what you have in abundance.

The gentle cry of help, the anguish of an artistic soul but one whose fire and spirit rises above the flames and arrows and sees a new horizon in which to explore, whilst never letting the scratch marks left by a few truly do damage.    

Pins is a fine example of a single released for all the right reasons, yes it’s a taste of what is to come but without any doubt what is to come from within the poetic no-nonsense mind will only benefit from this early gorgeous release.

Ian D. Hall