Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Quality is everything. It may be that as an artist you produce a song a day, place a poem before the world as it wakes up every morning, slave over an essay of 4000 words in which the core argument is lost, or even show black and white stills of images taken through the eyes of the camera lens every 24 hours, but quantity means nothing if the substance is found to be wanting, skeletal like and hungering for something to hang its chops upon.

For Gren Bartley and his third album, Magnificent Creatures, quality is heavily abundant, it sits with wonderful portly like stature at the dining table and acts with the grace and demeanour of a sainted hero, one whose very actions deserve to have tales told of his music and be led to high tables.

Magnificent Creatures is an album of great warmth and ambition but one that isn’t afraid to realise that at times the lyrics are the most precious gift that is afforded the song. The capturing of such moments are sometimes lost in the overcrowding of musical desire, the punctuation mark employed with dramatic effect by an instrument finding that it has been left out of the proceedings and wishing to make its mark before the end of the album; it is in that that many recordings can fall flat and seen to be a despairing addition when all that is needed is to hear the gentleness of a lyric offered to the ether.

With Gren Bartley being joined by Julia Disney, Sarah Smout and Lydia Glanville on such impressive songs as Fair Shape, Nightingale, Strange Times and the excellent This Changes Everything, Magnificent Creatures moulds itself into a piece of work that typifies the thought of quality overriding the experience of quantity, of a superior type of pleasure being observed and a set of songs quite rightly being given the air time they deserve.

Quality always tells in the end and in Magnificent Creatures that quality is a living, breathing mortal beast that just offers assurance and class.

Ian D. Hall