Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
In your heart you know what you yearn, it is only your mind that seeks to divert you from a path you wish to take, how else do those hours awake at night drag you down, leave you feeling a different mood, bring strange thoughts, blurred, indecipherable visions and scenarios to mind, would it be better to listen to your heart, feel content as it beats softly against your chest, Hours Awake is a blissful state of conscious if you take note of what keeps you conscious.
It is a conscious that Rachel Croft brings to the listener in her new debut album, a series of songs that act in many ways as a confessor to the day’s toil, a storyboard which asks you to add to the feeling of the picturesque and the beauty painted by the artist. Contentment is not always about having what you think you deserve, but in the action of celebrating somebody else’s thoughts and adding your own peace and tranquillity to the art of surrender.
There is an unmistakable sensuality to the album which comes across like a wave tenderly smoothing down the sand on a semi-deserted beach at dusk, those that remain, huddled around small camp fires and looking out to sea as if gaining perspective and hope for the future, witness this gentle lapping and spend the next few precious Hours Awake in a maze of thoughts and possible dreams.
In songs such as Don’t Feel Like Holding On, Change Your Mind, Long Were The Hours and Can’t Replace Your Perfect, Rachel Croft tends to that sensual craving deep inside all of us and strengthens the bond between the observed and the witnessed.
You can spend Hours Awake fretting over Time and its possible effects on your life, the only result of that being is that eats into your soul, if you must stay conscious, then instead of experiencing mind numbing fear, look to the sensual, feel the roused heart and seek a higher conscious; it is an avenue of approach justified in the work of Rachel Croft.
Rachel Croft releases Hours Awake via Black Ink on February 8th.
Ian D. Hall