Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The darkness can be a place where the consuming nature of humanity can lead to the feeling of inaction, where apathy escorts the soul to its own inevitable destruction. If though you can even see the light, a thin wedged margin just within arm’s reach and offering a sense of comfort, then to walk that line is feel perhaps the most alive, where Inertia is handed a throbbing beat and a pulse in which to feel the spark glow red hot and burn with joy.

Walking the line, copious amounts do it, many find they can juggle talking the talk at the same time but to do it in a sympathetic style whilst all the time perfecting an atmospheric mood, that is being able to walk between an erupting volcano and a raging sea and still be able to admire the sea shells that litter the shore. We Are Parasols not only feel the rage on either side of them but take the time to declare with certainty that the shells found are even more sensitive to human interaction than either forces of nature that are minutes from taking life.

The feeling of Philip K. Dick and Aldous Huxley permeates through the songs on offer, dystopian, a future steeped in the madness of our own violent past and the once modern skyscraper utopia envisaged as humanity reached for the stars, replaced by the crumbling edifice of our own folly, where androids have not only become part of life, they imitate it to the point of the degraded and the unkempt desire.

In the form of a concept album it is to avoid making comparisons to each track, like an individual chapter inside books such as Foundation and Earth, Dune or 1984, you look to the whole to give you the release that you crave. However in tracks such as Concrete, Scoptophilia, Quarantine, Recoil and Dim, We Are Parasols bridge the divide between the synthetic and the symphonic with great effect.

There is no inertia, no lethargy or disinterest, the spirit of the album is concentrated and aware; Inertia is a positive outcome in the hands of this Portland band.

Ian D. Hall