Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Six minutes is an epic amount of time in which to play out a single for, but then if the song resonates with detail, fervent enquiry and a heart that is enthusiastically persuasive to the ear as it listens out for the chance to have a fresh experience in which to hold the soul captive, then that six minutes are ones that are well spent, played over in the mind, repeated on the stereo and given the chance to make the cheeks Scarlett with anticipation.

Recorded at Liverpool’s Parr Street Studios, and produced by Alex Quinn, Harry Miller’s Scarlett is a song that is hauntingly beautiful but at the same time cannot help but bring certain emotions to the fore of the listener’s mind. The loss of young life through any factor is one that hits home hard, it is not an experience you would wish upon anyone, it is not a subject that gets talked of, the sense of taboo is arguably overwhelming and for all the right reasons.

Yet somehow, we must bring up the conversation, the point of accepting is grief’s best ally, we don’t have to ever forget, but we must find a way to talk, that memory must be allowed to flourish, to be positive in the end.

The anger and grief spills out with the passion of the unstoppable in Harry Miller’s Scarlett, and it is a pure, relentless anger that sees the foundation of the song and the lyrics heavily pronounced and influenced by the investment made of the loop pedal, perhaps an offering to the perpetual nature of this taboo always playing in the mind, never quite understood, but so wanting to be heard, the expression of tears and rage all the more captivating because of it.

Scarlett is, as the colour might suggest, the passion, the fury, the resignation, and the belief, it is a song that really deserves the airtime, those six minutes are the culmination of the grief, of the questioning, and the desire to let the emotional barricade fall; all dams must eventually burst, Scarlett is powerful and authoritative, formidable and yet crushingly beautiful, enough to bring down walls of silence. A truly epic single.

Ian D. Hall