Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
You can expect the unexpected all you like, you can train your spotlight on any area, focus it into the depths of the echoing cavern, direct it into the sky and pinpoint where the stars are dancing to the Universe’s rules. Yet the unexpected shifts direction, it takes on a different hue and shape, and all of a sudden the exposed light finds that all it was aiming at was a black hole out of which comes nothing but intrigue and attraction.
It is to the expected that perhaps we have the greatest affiliation, the moment of anticipation is arguably greater because the image is built up, it may be assumed, it could be thought of as illumination surrounded by a thousand candles bowing their wicks and lighted heads in honour, but what it is an adoration unblemished, the prospect of appreciating life in the full glare and not asking yourself whether Was This Love Or Just A Trick Of The Light?
Was This Love Or Just A Trick Of The Light? finds Liverpool’s Brothers Of Mine in exemplary form, the four songs that make up this new E.P. release hammering home the gravity in which the band occupy. The space in which pristine light that emanates from their collective will, can dig deep into the mightiest of black holes and see through it, the view on both sides has long been established but now is to be seen as an experience, the beginning having been worked through, the edges smoothed out and what remains is not a trick or youthful deception, but the result of absolute hard work.
Across the four tracks, Waves, She, Productive and Careless, Brothers Of Mine take the image of love and expand it, they stand proud in its wake and shake the ground beneath its feet, sometimes and with wilful grace and a slight nod of moody exuberance, knock it aside, teaching the art of love a valuable and timely lesson, to never assume that the feeling is always reciprocated without harsh thought.
Expect the unexpected, but don’t be a slave to it, instead master the control of delivering a piece that goes beyond the demand, that dodges the fallen into habit of others and becomes striking new set of rules into which the heavens have no answer. It is fair to say that this is not just love, it is worship.
Brothers Of Mine release Was This Love Or Just A Trick Of The Light? On 18th January.
Ian D. Hall