Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
If you haven’t felt like an outsider in life then perhaps you have either been spared great pain and looks of pity and resentment, or with greater depth, you have looked upon the masses blindly following the latest craze and fashions and thanked whichever deity looks after your soul or your own reason, that you are not part of the experiment. Whichever way you look upon it, being The Outsider is either a blessing or a curse in which to live with.
Following up from the impressive debut album Small Town Talk, Ma Polaine’s Great Decline’s highly rated musical presentation of the theatrical intrigue continues with a set of songs that engulf the thinking of the outsider, those that are perhaps shunned by society or to whom see the way people live, sometimes within the despairing bubble of their own like minded thoughts, as verging on the ridiculous, a negative impact on the way we all would like to live, side by side and with harmony.
When looking upon a band or artist’s second album, it is only natural to look for the dip, the reasons perhaps why the debut stands out in such an unusual or physically appealing way; it is natural, but in the case of Ma Polaine’s Great Decline, it is unwarranted, unnecessarily futile, for the album only stretches the love for the band further. It is with strength and gratitude that they take their own individuality and give it the depth required to step out of the debut album’s shadow.
It is in the darkness that one experiences a different kind of friendship, one perhaps that lasts and is more enamoured by the shadows than the harsh brightness installed and insisted upon by others. The ballads of the furious, the songs of the dispossessed and the sonnets of those willing to swim in the opposite direction to the mass and the current, these are the truths in which The Outsider is cast in positive light.
Tracks such as Fisherman’s Fury, The Poison Sits, Can’t Have You, Crazy, The Lion’s Head and Old Fashioned Goodbye, these sentiments of the dark and the provocative raise the game and their will to wonderful heights and deserved applause.
It is in such searches for a different truth, to which Ma Polaine’s Great Decline excel and The Outsider is a series of continuing brilliance to which cannot be contained or pigeon holed. More than a worthy successor to Small Town Talk, The Outsider is the stranger in the room willing to point out that the truth held dear by others is contrary and contradictory to advancing our own state of mind.
Ian D. Hall