Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It is only by accident that some of the greatest discoveries are made, that inner voice in your gut which suggests with high spirits, “Try me, you’ll like me, you will love me”; it happens so much but we often disregard the advice our senses tell us, implores upon us and yet if we did but listen the once, like the random happy accident that awaits, our hearts would undoubtedly be more fulfilled. It is a happy accident to come across art in the same way, the moment when you hear a snatch of a song and find yourself buying an album and not being disappointed at all.
It is Lewis & Leigh’s Ghost that such happy accidents turn, the meeting of an album so wrapped in silk and honest flesh that the velvet touch of the songs are riveting, inspiring and at times full of the beauty of melancholy and despairing hope that they positively glow, that they are happy phantoms in the well of life.
The subtly of the Welsh valley and the industry of a great people is mixed with sensuality of a woman whose American background and raised perspective give the songs the hard hitting reality that the listener would crave, a delight wrapped in the same silk but one that carries the folk and the Americana together; it is the marriage of such unlikely forces that make the ghost appear.
Al Lewis and Alva Leigh have created something very impressive in this album, each song is like a whisper in the dark delivered by your most dearest loved one, a small but cheery declaration of love unbound and it carries with it much weight.
In tracks such as the fantastic Rubble, arguably one of the songs of the year, Heart Don’t Want, Piece of Gold and Losing Time, Lewis & Leigh offer the discovery of a lifetime, that somewhere in the muddied D.N.A. of humanity’s blatant disregard for compassion, of its often turning away from the unpalatable truth, lays a beating twin heart with so much care in its approach to musical truth that it cannot be defined in any other way than beautiful.
The happy phantom of discovery is alive and well, you just have to appreciate its unearthing; Ghost is that phantom made corporeal.
Ian D. Hall