Liverpool Sound and Vision rating * * * *

“Ghosts don’t haunt us…They’re present among us because we won’t let go of them”, wrote Sue Grafton with more than a touch of Earthy wisdom. It is perhaps a sentence that carries much weight when viewed from the spectre of how the arts can infect us mind, body and soul, and one that is particularly telling when we realise just how impossible it is to remove ourselves from the fragile beauty of the Apparitions that surround us and which give is great joy and the feeling of incorruptible melancholy at the same time.

For Somerset-based duo, Ford Collier and Alex Garden, collectively known as The Drystones, the understanding of Folk music stands in reason that they should see the genre as a continuing cycle of words and music, the beguilement of the traditional that always seems to capture the fluid boundaries to which apparitions, ghosts and mournful spectres congregate, is more than substantial, it is the epitome of graceful and effortless companionship that focuses our attention and makes us boldly push those fine lines further back.

The Drystones have stretched themselves on this new recording, forsaking the relative comforts of the studio, and instead keep promises made in the ether to themselves that they would nurture the ghosts of the genre and seek out beyond the illusionary nods of others as they offer a hard but elegant appraisal of how music, as all forms of life, should be pushed to the limit of endurance.

Across songs and moments of fine insightful passion such as Dean’s, The Story, Jack Crook, Nonesuch, Breathless and Rule of 3, Ford Collier and Alex Garden address the ghosts and reminders of time gone by and strike out, lighting the way for the Apparitions to be witnessed and to prove that there is nothing to be afraid of in welcoming them into your soul.

Apparitions is bold, suitably complex but undeniably charming, a creative ambition fulfilled and one that is harnessed by a duality of energy, the proof of moments gone, recaptured, altered, loved and released, spirits freed, phantoms danced with in daylight. A dramatic vision aurally unveiled; Apparitions is a moment of Folk glory.

Ian D. Hall