Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Life doesn’t often throw us the life-line of harmony, the sense of discord is too readily available, we display our faces with permanent smiles and wear our masks with certainty, believing that if we show a sense of Projection of ourselves onto the vision of others, then perhaps they might infuse us with their positivity, the creative beauty of the pleasant and the tuneful we all search for.
Projection is a fear of ourselves shown on the lives of other people, our worries, our anxieties, the pressures we face, whether in the form of expectation from peers and friends, or in the digital world, the face we use to show that we are friendly, that we can be trusted. Yet inside we perhaps feel lost, alone, out of step with the world and the constant disconnection with real life, Projection is the hollow in which we slide and in which there is always a regret, a tear of truth and grief within its boundaries.
The passionate fusion of Jazz-Folk-Rock pursued by Sinnober, Sebastian and Natalie Brice have been working towards this moment of clarifying what it means in the modern age to see projection as a tool to attain harmony, that if we open our eyes and our hearts we can seek and find answers to the fundamentals, even if we don’t feel enlightened by them.
What does come across in the album though is the scope in which the pair find solace and offer it to the listener, a shared experience, an album in which implores us to show the fractured nature of our being with honesty but not with shame, that we can be prepared to shine. Across songs such as True North, When A Knight Won His Spurs, Garbo’s Song, the beautiful climax of Alexandra Leaving and the astonishing cover of the song made arguably famous by The Walker Brothers, Tom Rush’s No Regrets, that sense of healing is paramount, it is positively pure.
One of the harmonious albums of 2018, Projection is illuminating when in the hands of those that care, that show with patience that their song is one in which an attentive soul can feel unburdened for a while.
Ian D. Hall