Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Never forget your roots, that place in life in which you found the necessary sustenance in which to nurture your soul and your feeling for your place within the world, those roots are important, for not only do they inspire you, they also motivate and enthuse your ability to pass on what is best about that place, it gives the sense of continuation needed to make sure such towns and memories never fade and die.
It is a rememberance, a celebration of the roots that flames Wire & Wool’s eponymous album and one that threatens to spread the seed of fire onward. It is never enough to only hear one album by a band, not if the musicianship contained within is of the quality which can make the heart pound hard, can make it dance with the all energy of the sun and reflect with cold hard facts with all the might of the moon at midnight; it is never enough and Wire & Wool have that in spades.
Consisting of Mark Hand, Alex Riach, Jimmy Buchanan Wright, Hazel Martin, Theo Barnard, James Hall and Barry Nisbet, Wire & Wool work hard to preserve the energy they expel throughout the album, they instigate a sense of belonging, of possessing the point of being at one with the surroundings and the stories of the area, the minute details of knowing what it is to enjoy the place which binds you most to the art that you consume and offer to the world.
Like the sun that sits high in the summer sky, the sense of serenity is absolute but unseen, underneath all that outburst reigns fire, the passion of the inferno waits to be combusted and spread like a bonfire signal in the face of enemy invasion. Wire & Wool is the warning shot and it big, clever and exciting.
In the songs What Would Eric Say, Nifty Fate, Baltimore and the glorious Bound to Roam, in which the feminine voice brings a whole different perspective to the way that you would arguably think of people who find the highway a dream pursuit, Wire & Wool bring the voice of the dynamic and incurable delight very much to the forefront of roots music. It is a sensation in which to have the honour of being part of; after all we all have the same roots, it just comes from a different branch of thought.
Ian D. Hall