Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Vanessa Murray has been quietly biding her time on the Liverpool music scene, just out of the spot-lights glare, intriguing enough people and entertaining many more with her ability to support many a musician, notably the great Alan O’ Hare as part of the Only Child project or fellow aspiring musicians from L.I.P.A. It is a spotlight that has dazzled and impressed and now finally, a set of songs that have been carefully knitted together are to be set forth on the world.

It’s About Time, as most things are in this world, for a light revolution, a reflection and insight into a young woman’s mind and a series of songs that just capture the mood with serious beauty and questions that go far beyond what it means to be a woman in a world still predominantly ruled by men and the nature of relationships, the love and sometimes perplexing choices we make.

It’s About Time is a reflection of the honest endeavour found in the vast majority of young aspiring artists in the city, of the talent they have and wish to share with the world and perhaps to some who find the door not just shut, but in many cases welded airtight and padlocked. It is the same in relationships as it is in art and Vanessa Murray takes those feelings and brings the five songs that make up the E.P. out into the open, to be digested and understood, to be seen as a young woman’s frankness about she feels and the emotions that like a genie struggling against the top of his long incarceration, are about time to be feel the force of the natural air and not the self contained prison we all place ourselves in.

The five songs, I Don’t Want To Lose You Like This, the excellent Fire That Burns within, World’s Apart, Thanks To You and the E.P.’s title track, are not just tracks burned in hope, played with ambition, they are a demand placed down and to be taken notice of. These are five songs that stipulate that the spotlight, so skilfully deflected whilst she got to the point where the craft was being learned, is now and with just cause upon her own songs and not what she brings to other groups or other musician’s timetables.

It is about time after all, how much we make use of it whilst we are here, for Vanessa Murray, time has been well spent.

Ian D. Hall