Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If the need for the sincere spiritual uplift is ever taken up, then surely it would fall to Shirlie Roden to supply it.
Music is a subjective beast, the adoration or the desire of it is as individual as the snowflake cascading, hurtling with intent down to Earth and can be just as easily destroyed by the uncaring or the blindly ignorant. It can suffer derision, it can enlighten. Yet throughout it all a particular piece of music might fall into the hands and it can offer a glimpse of something tangible that had not been seen before, a sideways glance out of the corner of a myopic eye and the realisation that the world is so much bigger, so much brighter that it was thought to be. This is arguably the case with Shirlie Roden’s seventh studio album, Be The Love.
True to its name Be The Love offers an encouragement that cannot be easily dismissed, that refuses to be the delicate snowflake crushed under the foot of ignorance and intolerance, it is the keen sense of approachability within each song that makes the album have a real feeling of affection for the awareness of the world around us and the fleeting time we have upon it.
Ms. Roden’s very beautiful voice haunts each track, not with the spectre’s guilt but with the care of a spirit long since thought to have shifted its perception and gaze inwards. It is the gaze and the narrative of this spirit that gives tracks such as Skydancer, the awesome Buffalo Brings Us Peace, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die and the legendary family background status behind The Gift that makes the album captivating and a surprising joy.
Full of positive hope, rammed with the aching presence of humanity and aspiration for a better future that the one we promised ourselves, Be The Love transfers its presence onto the listener with ease, the strange desire to rest and drink in the words an omnipresent fixture and one that deserves bundles of credit for its production. The sweet sound of the calm and the serene rarely sounds this good.
Ian D. Hall