Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It is only to be expected that the Fin de Siecle is an period in which many superstitions and false ideas seem to gather around; the End Of The Times in which we live in, the struggle in which every human cannot comprehend the way in which they feel at odds with themselves as the status quo is ripped apart and a new future is brought into being. The trepidation is such that people will cling to the familiar to get them through the signs, omens and the theatre of change.
If you are to cling to the familiar then there are not many better bands who offer a musical salvation than The Corridors. A group of musicians who seem to offer a chink of dawn several hours ahead of the first rays of light that hits the roofs and bounces through the windows into the unsuspecting and weary eye; it is the familiar in which the band offer and one that should be gratefully approached.
End Of The Times, the soothsayer’s favourite prediction, up there with the end is nigh, and yet what comes through with the album is not the end, not even the stirrings of the glorious middle but the determination and grand confidence of the beginning; the marker for a band that has pedigree behind them and one that is ready to jump even further, to go beyond the realms of the end of their comfort zone and insist upon ever greater results.
The album kicks out, it drags the listener beyond the Fin de Siecle and suggests with authority that the darkness they feel, the trepidation in the nerves and the quickening pulse, is nothing more than illusion. The only thing that can quicken the pulse is that of the band itself and for that the pulse just cannot keep up.
In tracks such as Delicate Condition, Just Like The Way She Thought It Will Be, a very good cover version of Bruce Springsteen’s I’m On Fire and I Have Died A Thousand Times, The Corridors open up the senses of the listener and without arrogance, without shame, tell them that it will be O.K., that the end is not close, that it is not even being heralded by the prophets; that this is only the End Of The Times and the sound is as sweet as they want to hear it.
Ian D. Hall