Liverpool Sound and Vision * * * *

Haunting sounds and a vocal that defies the feeling of inhibited space, it is perhaps apt that Aberystwyth’s Novo Amor has called his new album Birthplace, as through the whole beautiful experience of listening to the recording you cannot but help but think of the times when you have heard a new born being placed in the loving arms of its mother and the secure but nervous hands of its father. It is a haunting and drama filled sound that escapes from the mouths of both the new born in mind, and for Novo Amour it is equally the start of something precious, something extraordinary.

We all have a place in which we call home, that probably is more important to ourselves than where we might have been born, after all the sense of sterility that comes with being delivered in a room along with hundreds of others every year, being born at home, in a remarkable setting is perhaps like finding a place in which your music, your own particular art becomes natural, unique to you, after all the sweat and worry, the foundation of the relationship you have with what fills your soul comes from the setting in which you first conceive it, where you first nourish and encourage the ideas flowing from you.

Novo Amor’s Birthplace is a set of songs that are intuitive, instinctive, almost carrying a sense of their own conscious, that initial cry, human, full of reflex and passion, is something that sticks in the mind, and one that is arguably unlike anything you may have heard outside the great Art Garfunkel provide and showcase.

Across songs such as Emigrate, Anniversary, 13494, Sleepless and Repeat Until Death, Novo Amor digs deep into the listener’s psyche, he finds value and a voluntary sense of pause, willing the album and its songs to search for something primeval in us all, a set of responses to which we feel surrounded by love, by a feeling of admiring the new and wanting to protect it at all costs.

An album which is remarkable and gifted, it matters not in the end where you consider home, it is the birthplace which gives you your start in life.

Ian D. Hall