Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Who wouldn’t want all that glistens beneath the beckoning sign that sits in the Californian hills, the bright lights of a million stars and their sometimes inevitable fading careers, the welcoming handshake and the talking down of orders as one face fits and a thousand others fall by the way side. Hollywood has it all, the fame, the glamour and the dirt and it takes a special breed of person to want to try their luck there.

For Inside View, Hollywood is not just a symbol, a convenience of place names in which to idolise, scratch behind the posts that hold up the white wooden sign and that’s where the hard work is actually taking place; the work of truth and no regret, of sentimental but unabashed precision and frank exposure and in that, Inside View have once more struck right to the heart of the issues once again.

The change of band membership has not hindered the sound, whereas in some groups there can be an unsettling nature of going from intriguing album and changing the guard to the next, however in Inside View and with thanks to Anthony O’ Brien and Danny Heaton’s tenacity that they wear as a badge of honour and with Sean Murphy still providing the drums for them where needed, this more blunt, forthright and resolved drive catches the ear as well as its predecessor.

With Will Potts coming on board with the bass and all three main members combining to add percussion, Hollywood captures both the dream and the destruction wrought, not just in that land of make believe and ivory towers, but in the everyday, the seemingly normal and the habitually common. Tracks such as Hurricane, the splendid Casanova, One Night In Vegas, Something Real and the delicious album title track with its hidden surreal nature and oblique, perhaps unconsciously delivered stare at the nature of things, Hollywood is just as important a staging post as the band’s 2012 debut.

It may have been a while coming but Hollywood has come calling, and it should be a call that is answered.

Ian D. Hall