Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The Sun may bring life, it may make the dark simply look like a tool of repression but in the end it holds less mystery to the naked eye, less intrigue what lays beyond than the creature of the night, Earth’s shadow, the Moon.

The Moon arguably inspires more poetry, more love in the heart of the songwriter, George Harrison may have captured the zeitgeist with Here Comes The Sun but the Moon influences the darker and spiritual side of Humanity’s relationship with what stretches out into the void. To remove that, to snuff out the spectral, to Blow Out The Moon, is commit an act of poetic treason.

The collaboration between Alasdair Roberts, Emily Portman, Lucy Farrell and Rachel Newton in The Furrow Collective’s five track E.P. Blow Out The Moon is one in which the listener understands the fine line, the merging of musicianship between the great unseen border between English and Scottish talents, the great respect that politics will never understand for which music soars above the everyday.

The feeling of the supernatural, the echoing of certain instruments into which the restoration of peace and tranquillity are afforded is one in which the listener cannot help but feel part of. If damage were to be seen to be done to the light in the dark, the collective responsibility would overshadow our hearts but as the songs, including the superb The Unquiet Grave and Shule Agre, illustrate with fine beauty, where there is no blame, where as a society the spectral hangs in the air and in which hope for any type of navigation or illumination can be grasped, then it is a cause for celebration.

Like a candle burning brightly in the darkness, the end will come too soon but the memory of the great songs, of light and beautiful vocals, will more than enthuse the passion of anyone coming across the E.P.

Ian D. Hall