Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is more in this world than we can ever truly perceive, we think we feel the depth of our emotions but we never truly understand or grasp just how much damage or elation we cause ourselves in the pursuit of forever, of wanting to search for the Always as we forget the here and now. The horizon is majestic but so too is the foreground, so too is The Blue Hour in which strikes the ethereal and the charge of enlightenment.

It is a charge answered with the mesmeric, the fragile and the delicate but one built with strength in its own depth, Always with the hypnotic weaved into the substantial light, instinctive and full of the mysterious. With the addition of Maria Grig on strings for three tracks, One More Mystery, Block The Sound and Lost Landmarks, the album takes on the form of the sensitive and the sequenced art.

Art should always be at the forefront of the message, it should allow the communication to grow, to place special implication down like a mandate, one that cannot be ignored for fear of missing out on a moment of sublime beauty and in such a way The Blue Hour find themselves once again making a statement in their music that is heartening and charismatic.

Tracks such as Fire On The Rooftops, the fleeting but distinctive aura that surrounds A Ghost Walked In Antwerp, the aforementioned Block The Sound and Lost Landmarks, A Tree Stands Alone and Tower Over Me are haunting, poignant, evocative and full of lasting memory of a Noir-like narrative placed down; this is the blend in to which the rhythm focuses, in which it breaks down the tender to the point of being seen as a compassionate a truth of the atmospheric candour.

The Blue Hour once again provide a back drop of seamless romance, one that is entwined with the face of culture that has been largely ignored to the detriment of humanity; one cannot simply forget how we all come from the perceived squalor, it is those though that see the beauty in the Always that find a way to convey it best.

Ian D. Hall