Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

We are nothing but flesh and bone that walks an Earth that is often painful, frequently bitter and habitually elusive. We find our way only by listening carefully to our souls, by wandering, often without hope or company, that one hand in the darkness that gives us reassurance, until finally through the dark, the clawing mist and the years of doubt, we succeed in the treasure of the universe as we Find A Light to guide us to our natural surroundings.

The sixth studio album release from Blackberry Smoke is once again a journey into the southern rock majesty that the band have long held sway over. Some journeys become old, tired, the listener used to the scenery, becomes almost blasé with the familiar and decides that whilst it is comfortable, it wouldn’t hurt to drift out of tune and let the mind think on other pursuits.

Not so with Find A Light, the sharpness of the lyrical expression is not meant to be comforting, it is there to keep you fully alert, to pound on the heart, to strike down with vengeance those that come between you and a sound bathed in the aftermath of a verbal explosion, images thought to be scattered everywhere and not making sense, instead are the bigger picture with which the giant is released from its captivity and once more stretches its arms out and slays the nondescript and the futile.

In tracks such as The Crooked Kind, Best Seat In The House, Lord Strike Me Dead, the excellent and relishing in its truth of observation Nobody Gives A Damn, Medicate My Mind and Till The Wheels Fall Off, Charlie Starr, Paul Jackson, Brandon Still, Richard Turner and Brit Turner set out to search for the mysterious and often obscured glow that lives in our souls and finds illumination, a radiance in which they cajole and finally snare but to whom each one gives thanks before offering it to the listener a moment in which to praise for its discovery, before letting it loose, to find another soul to help find the way.

A smooth and defining album, Find A Light is an album of many positives, of the buoyant and the creative listening to itself and knowing that out there in the darkness is a reason to seek enlightenment and illumination.

Ian D. Hall