Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
No person is truly an island, perhaps not even a peninsula, cut partially adrift but somehow staring out to the far horizon as if with noble intentions, only a tenuous link keeping it from becoming a solitary mass and suffering from its own identity and practises. We like to think of ourselves as unified, a combined thought acting in many ways together, and when the fight is against us, we somehow pull together, weathering the storm as one.
We are none of these things, not fully unified, not a lone island bravely holding back the storm and heroic in the face of dangerous times, however, we are arguably all our own Archipelago. We are connected not by the greater mass but like neurons, synaptic misfires which somehow tell us that in our of need, there may be someone close by in which we can turn to, in which might cover our rear as we hold on as rough seas shake us and perhaps cover us over for a while.
It is in this realisation, this understanding in which British Columbia’s Shred Kelly deliver their new album, the west coast of Canada’s constant vigilance in seeking out the Pacific waves that might tear at the fabric of the human archipelago’s interaction with each other, that Shred Kelly have found a beautiful sense of horizon in waiting was always going to happen and yet the distance taken truly magnifies the desire in which to get this particular piece of art just right.
In songs such as Don’t Ever Look Back, Jupiter (Any Other Way), Die Trying, Weightless and Wasting Time, Shred Kelly seek out the inlets of the mind, they encounter the coastlines which to many seem inaccessible and holding only drought riven plains and find an abundance of material which satisfies the soul and creates an even, temperate mood, but one that also can see the weather turn, can feel the cold bitter wind cause disruption in amongst the feeling of a sanctuary of music.
An album in which the music is not only deep but found to holding at bay the excess of a modern age, reliant on a sense of purity, fashioned in the spirit of a more golden age of musical exploration; this is an Archipelago which revels in its connections to all.
Ian D. Hall