Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Slow and meandering, wistful, peaceful, ally, hindrance, roaring with thunder or verging on the edge of destructive impulse, whichever way you look at the river that runs closest to your home, it can be argued that it influences you more than you realise. Just as those who are fortunate to live by the sea feel the calm reassurance of the tides and the crash of the waves as they skim off layer after layer of rock, so too does The River place its timeless majesty into the heart of the community and for Hamish Napier, The River is the subject of an album that has all the attributes needed to make the person think just that little bit more about what shapes their lives.

With arrangements that wouldn’t be out of place in an album produced by Mike Oldfield, Hamish Napier, alongside Sarah Hayes, James Lindsay, Martin O’ Neill and Calum MacCrimmon, brings the world of the natural force of water, of the surrounding banks and the world that is invisible at times to the naked and unfeeling eye and it is a startling revelation to the senses when it digests the enormity of the project that is being undertaken and offered before the critical listener.

That listener, to whom the riverbank might be an alien landscape as they spend Time wading through the industrial trials that beset them in the fast and sometimes deliberately unbalanced world, is given the opportunity to relish a place in which Time is rendered semi meaningless, the current always running, the bank always busy; life goes on even when you start to chew on the end of a piece of grass and watch ripples collide with stones.

Although the album can be seen as one long continuous piece, a concept album driven by separate messages, certain tracks really set the album on its way to to the place of thrilling and enjoyable possibilities. The hectic and beautifully demanding Mayfly, Drowning of the Silver Brothers, Floating and the honour that appears full and dignified in both sections of Spey Cast, all comes to a head as The River snakes its way into the heart of the listener’s conscious; like the majesty that resides in The Wind in the Willows, the stories that Hamish Napier weaves are bountiful and unstinting in their appreciation.

The River is a glorious album, one of vigorous desire and plentiful absolution.

Ian D. Hall