Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It might be considered a tad too much to want to roll out the red carpet, to place the fireworks ready in the strategic place and put the brightly coloured bunting out, to basically throw a party the size of Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall but to welcome back one of the great live and studio acts of the last ten year. Well, perhaps the red carpet might be a bit glaring but the fact remains that the exceptional Natalie McCool is very much one of the great female acts of the last decade and is up there with the likes of Joanne Shaw Taylor for bringing the very best out of music.
With the red carpet put away, Natalie McCool’s latest album, The Great Unknown, is full of mystery, beauty and the steel gaze of perfection that comes from someone who has really become such a firm favourite on the music circuit and who gives more than can be ever asked of in both spirit and material.
The Great Unknown, beyond the expectations of her fans and arguably of herself, Natalie McCool has produced an album of scintillating form, of edgy variety and dramatic manner, one that sits comfortably in the ear and yet doesn’t give the listener the chance to catch breath; it is the pop eloquence wrapped up in the Rock demeanour and it is utterly, beautifully, devastating.
Like a flower that has been kept indoors to let it grow beyond the initial phase of budding and promising potential, the follow up to Ms. McCool’s dynamic and dark debut album, is now in full bloom, it is the oak and the willow that have matured in the expansive garden and become the focal point of any conversation in the house. The songs may be slightly unfamiliar to the ears of Ms. McCool’s fans but the determination, the thrash of generosity that sits in the lyrics are no strangers.
In songs such as the exceptional Cardiac Arrest, Fortress, the agile Magnet, Just Let Me Go and You & I, Ms. McCool makes the indefinite and mysterious, established and notorious; she celebrates in its physicality and its gravitas. There is only one Natalie McCool and it is a privilege to have her back and being so entertaining with her music.
The Great Unknown, not a bit of it, this is a woman who should be seen as 21st Century female icon.
Ian D. Hall