Liverpool Sound and Vision rating 9/10

The curated sense of the critic will often dismiss a piece of art because it doesn’t suit their view of the world. All that they learned perhaps in the mud and avoiding arrows of open-mindedness is left to become bleak, a simmering condescension of opinions, desolate, and one that is left to become sterile, and all because it finally came across that they didn’t care, that they no longer gave a damn to how the view of the world has changed since they first drew fiery breathe.

For all her brilliance and wit, the American writer and cynic Dorothy Parker would arguably have been an anachronism in today’s world always looking for the next barbed comment in which to boil the ego, in which to let the cauldron of anecdote and mirth drain the enjoyment out of a piece of someone’s soul, the withering look which declares to the sound of trumpets and thumbs up on social media that there is nothing to the barren of art in today’s landscape.

Bob Leslie perhaps would smile at that, with a gentlemanly nod, a surveyance of etiquette and charm stretched out before him, for in The Barren Fig, to those that seek popularity, remember your own message can err on the side of fashion, gone in a cloud of ether, but the traditional, in the unending nourishing sound that goes round the mulberry bush, what will always be is the lasting effect of beauty, of pliable, attractive honesty, not driven by mode or the moment, but instead by the genuine care.

Accompanying Mr. Leslie through the maze of emotional responses and eloquently divine touches of the sincere allusions to the beauty of his home land is an act of beauty within itself; the culmination of any revolution must have the ability to register a climax of battle that can only be escorted by the like-minded and the pipers as the last chord and crowning of a new belief is installed. With Annie Neville on accordion, Kate Kramer on viola and fiddle and Pauline Vallance on clarsach and flute, songs such as the opener Up, Carles, Dance!, Upon A Foreign Shore, the deep sadness and enlightening response of I Thowt I Liked Winter, Already Walking So Tall, Ye’ll Nivver Find A Souter Down In Hell and the thought provoking Lands o the Sioux an the Cree leave a bountiful harvest of fruit and productive memories.

The Barren Fig, sometimes the modern critic will look away from such works, it doesn’t suit their personality or agenda, they are the ones missing out on a piece of art that is timeless in its delivery, passionate in its fertile imagination; a wonderful successor to 2017’s Land And Sea.

Ian D. Hall