Liverpool Sound And Vision Rating 9/10
The silver screen perhaps doesn’t dominate our lives as it once had the power to do, the epics of today perhaps not quite satisfying the taste buds, the heroes not dashing enough, the heroines of not holding the attention of the camera in the same way as the actresses who schemed and challenged conformity across the genres of Noir and horror pictures, the Monsters steeped in a place beyond nightmares; where Dracula and the Wolf-man are no longer misunderstood creatures, and instead have the right to be ugly in thought and deed.
Monsters come and go in fashion, not confined to the art of literature, the only boundary is our imagination, the sense of how far we can take the everyday person or being and make it grotesque, a larger than life, distorted and life-threatening menace, one whose actions are aggressive, mirrored by the society we have become.
It is in this hostile environment that we must remember what monsters were, what they originally stood for, a fear of the unknown, they represented the basic instinct at the centre of our subconscious, that of survival. It is an instinct that causes us to remember classic tales and in which we celebrate a new way of looking at them across art, beautifully framed, and full of personality, a personality given extra credence by musician James Gordon in his E.P. Monsters.
The exuberance of music is displayed with the right of confidence, a passionate full throttled affair in which the monsters unleashed are not ones crowned in the gory aftermath of untameable imaginations, but instead are bold, figurative, they stand aloft and proud and not without flaws, and it is that sense of pride, of completing something so beautiful that it registers with a 3-D effect, of symbolising the point of being larger than life.
In the tracks From The Deep, Blood Drunk, Until Your Body Grows Cold, I Know My Name and Haunted By The Sky, James Gordon commissions a formidable, and hugely impressive resonating sound, muscular, but not without the thought of compassion within its framework; Monsters of old incorporated and transplanted into the weighty topics that surround us today.
James Gordon fills a metaphorical hole between classic Folk Horror and the advancements of the modern world, a reminder that not all Monsters are bad, some, as in this case, are exciting and positively cool.
Ian D. Hall