Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

They are the symbol of the mocked and the scoffed at, they were alluded to as a punishment from God in the book of Genesis and they offer perhaps a more humid reflection on the way humanity treats its fellow man when they believe that imitation is not a sincere form of flattery but one that needs to be controlled and dispatched, to be held at arm’s length and to be kept within a prison of its own diabolical making. Thorns are there to remind us that whilst the going gets tough, the thorn can bite harder into the skin than any person who doesn’t understand or even want to try can ever do.

For Forthaven’s latest E.P. Thorns is a pretty evocative title name, it gives rise to so much pain and fear of the thought of the inevitable and yet deep underneath the scratch marks and the nicks and cuts stands the feeling of salvation, of redemption and an open honest heart reaching out beyond nature’s barbed wire.

Whether this is down to Nina Fian’s rapturous involvement on vocals, the cool guiding hand of the cello delivered by Alitair Ligerwood or Jay Roberts compositions, whatever the score, whatever the finality of it all, Thorns should not be seen as the biblical messenger of wrath but as something which has endearment running through its veins.

The four tracks, Saved, Sonrising, Underworld and the E.P. title track, Thorns, all resonate with a kind of thanks, a genuine outpouring of gratitude which has supplanted grief and abandonment in all things possible. It has a kind of natural progression in which the raised smile must eventually come forth and credit to where it is due, it is the mark of the songs bounty that makes the E.P. a worthy cause in which to feel secure, even if only for a short time.

For Forthaven the E.P. is that natural element, Thorns it may be in name but there is nothing prickly about the songs that spike the heart with their fragility and sense of the aware.

A piece of genuine brilliance that is never really in question.

Ian D. Hall