Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Seeing any one of Liverpool’s enjoyable and talented bands on the multitude of stages that hug the city is to be surely viewed as a mixture of honour and pleasure.

To be able to see the raw, the passionate and the creative mood in which is a source of life blood for The Mersey, is to know that the world still turns, that despite all the fury that government can reign down on the planet, there will always be groups and solo artists that stick their hands in the air and ask if the powers that be can cope with what’s coming next. The storm as it were fighting back with a smile, and that’s what you have in the sense of The Mono LPs, four musicians who make you sweat with anticipation and pure heart, who seriously pound the strings and the skin with venom and absolute assurance.

In Ste Reid, the Commander of the Bow Vicky Mutch, Chris Barlow and Daniel Beech, the pounding heart longs for more; like many Liverpool bands there is something in the Mersey Water that gets under the skin and is made corporeal before a note has been played out in anger.

It is that sense of anger, of rising against the corporate man-made machine, that The Mono LPs attain the dizzy heights of live performance that everybody, understandably, now expects; for there is no shyness on stage, there is no hiding place that these four musicians could not seek out, rip apart and expose to the light and as they took on the heat and sweat of the June evening, as they rose above the closeness of the air inside Studio 2, the dizzy height was once again scaled and devoured.

With the songs Hell, the superb Cherry Red Lips, Getting Away With It All, Emilia and I Don’t Love You all hitting home with the accuracy of a seasoned baseball player out to break opposition hearts, The Mono LPs were once again to be seen as a highlight in the musical calendar for Liverpool.

Give anyone Hell and they normally fight back with strident and passionate anger, give a Mono LPs audience Hell and they will ask and receive a night and a set littered with punch after punch of incredibly cool song writing and the timing of all instruments on stage in the squeal of delight of perfect unison; Hell is always heavenly when viewed from the eyes of the crowd.

Ian D. Hall