Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The story must have a beat to it, it must have the ability to make that come to me and click your fingers noise in your head or tap your fingers on the nearest inanimate object till the lady on the bus gives you sharp eyed look of annoyance, and even then the smile must continue, for the beat is everything that the story means to convey.
The beat that comes along with David Hershaw’s and Sandie Forbes’ excellent album Here Comes Tomorrow burns with passion, with the smouldering look of tranquillity at its disposal and composed yearning to set the world free from its insanity, its shackles and distanced stare of memory. It is a beat of the violin sensing a companion in the darkness, the starry eyed wonder that accompanies the mandolin; that marks the album out as a night in with the lights down low and the feeling of contentment washing over the listener in gentle but beguiling waves.
The old saying that tomorrow never comes has always been a lie, an abstract one of time for what is tomorrow but a day interrupted by sleep, tomorrow is but a day in which we can dream of better times, of more openness in society or just even that brief interlude in which Time has no hold on the choices in which we make.
It is a tomorrow that David Hershaw and Sandie Forbes lay a large stamp upon and claim by right for the rest of us, that such weaved dreams are possible, that tomorrow is ours to believe in and savour.
In tracks such as the fantastic New York City Rain, Footprints on the Tracks, the imagery of perhaps a long lost art in Voices on the Medium Wave and the special heart breaking tone of Comrade, David Hershaw and Sandie Forbes connect with their audience beyond the normal patterns of musical enjoyment and instead convey a deep longing, one that cannot ever be truly fulfilled but one that really does suggest that tomorrow can be tamed. It is a tomorrow in which we might say goodbye, shed a regretful tear or simply indulge in passion and yet tomorrow must come.
A simply marvellous album, one of traditional joy and one sparking with fierce kindness, Here Comes Tomorrow, one of brilliant confidence.
Ian D. Hall