Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Embrace the change of revolution, the quake of personal transformation, for if you look closely under the skin, what you find is not conversion but innovation, an advancement in the original and yet one with all the attributes, positivity and panache that first came along and made you sit up and take notice of the uniqueness in the initial meeting.
It is to one of the much loved performers that has lit up the Liverpool scene in the last decade, Natalie McCool, that innovation, change, revolution has come along and gone on to prove that form is always temporary, and that class is permanent.
A new guise but still the same passion, the same face at the front of the stage but one in which has welcomed the group ethic and the change perhaps of pace, of style but one in which Memory Girl has surfaced and become a hit, a resounding pleasure in one short, but overwhelmingly passionate appearance at this year’s Smithdown Road Festival.
Memory Girl, an allusion in name to something fantastical, a turn of the 20th Century stage show in which feats of wonder were performed and gasps from the audience were to be heard, the ability of the artiste to be congratulated and the playbills and newspaper column inches of the time full of words of fulsome praise that would today be considered perhaps over the top, extraordinary. Yet the words fit, as they do with Memory Girl, indomitable, immeasurable, digging deep into your soul and making it feel blessed and for a time at The Craft Taproom, the world was settled upon in axis, content that this new project is one that is going to be enormous and fulfilling.
In such a short time the feeling was set in stone, a typical robust and sensual performance, but one that now looks to the future, as captivating as Ms. McCool’s show at Leaf as part of Sound City all those years ago, but one now that has the fruits of another dynamic thrusting into the limelight.
In tracks such as Devils, Tongue Tied, Heaven, Better, Giving It Up and Take Me To Your Leader, Memory Girl places a huge stamp down on the music inspired passport and once more opens up avenues and destinations that may have seemed closed, destined to remain shut. Faith, we lack it as a species and when our eyes are reopened to the beauty of the person and the music they create, we marvel at the possibilities; if this performance at the Smithdown Festival proves anything, it is in the faith of Natalie McCool and her new project, we should trust absolutely.
Ian D. Hall