Pod Cousins performing in Bootle, July 2016. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is always something new to learn, someone else’s voice that must be heard, appreciated and perhaps loved, life without learning is to become stilted, stuck forever in the machine that is designed to grind you down to a place of acceptance and interminable arrogance.

You can see those that refuse to listen everywhere you look, their staggering conceit is in the way they walk, the way they hold their demeanour, to them, seeing something new is almost a death wish, they don’t understand and they never will the joy of such things. Yet they are the ones to miss out, they are the ones blinded and to feel sorry for as they miss out on something beautiful and fulfilling, especially when it is in the guitar playing and lyrical value held tightly by Pod Cousins.

It is impossible to see every band or artist that comes out of slow meaningful deck of cards we call life, human existence is too small, too crammed with other factions fighting for its time and yet if there is a man to catch as soon as you can then in Pod Cousins that trip into the unknown should be sought.

Pod Cousins, to some who had taken the day out to fight back against the grain of harm imposed by the week, might have been the relative unknown on the list of artists making sure that the people of Bootle, the residents on the bowling green grass and with the taste of freshly cooked burgers hanging wonderfully in the air, yet he is a tamer of thought, a song writer with keen perception for an ally and as he played in between the two acts vying for the Battle of the Bands title, the songs floated with beauty, with power and the relish of learning something new whetted the appetite within.

To feel hunger is not pleasant, it is a curse of the life we choose in pursuit of the material and yet there are singers who appease that hunger for something contemporary, originally blessed and Pod Cousins hands it out with a platter of truth and the sense of pristine. In songs such as I’m Glad I’m A No-One, Lonely Pirate, Stolen and My World Too, Pod Cousins fed the crowd with honour, their thirst for a new singer to look up to sated and refreshed.

A truly enjoyable experience, one that anyone who was at the Johnsons’ Pavilion would surely go out of their way to replicate; Pod Cousins is a luxury waiting to be savoured.

Ian D. Hall