Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Almost everybody wants to know Where The Action Is, the engagement between a group of people in which the dance of ideas are pitched and the sway of the carefully selected phrase is allowed to tightly wind itself around the listener’s heart and soul. The action is a call to arms, the latest rally in the never-ending fight against futility and the mundanity of life which dictates that stagnation is special, almost lauded, proposed by people who have no understanding of the right to stride onwards, to take heed of the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and act accordingly.
The drive is a spirit that lives and breathes fundamentally in Mike Scott and the incredible musicians that make up The Waterboys, an energy that is a combination of poetic pursuit and urgent desire, a coaxing of the phrase out of the learned bibles of poetry which by instinct pulls at the heart, which gives the listener the resounding imagery in which they can transplant their own life into that between the notes. It is in this comfort blanket of direction which makes The Waterboys such a lyrically imposing group to behold, that the music is exactly the point of Where The Action Is and one that cannot wait to rip off its shirt and reveal its muscled frame.
Across songs such as the wonderful homage to Time and Mick Jones, London Mick, Right Side Of Heartbreak (Wrong Side Of Love), Out Of All This Blue, Ladbroke Grove Symphony, Take Me There I Will Follow You and the finale of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Mike Scott, Steve Wickham, Paul Brown, Ralph Salmins, Aongus Ralston, Jess Kavanagh, Zeenie Summers create a giant, a being in itself to whom breathes deeply and which could arm wrestle against the power of apathy and leave it squealing in the corner, nursing its bruises and the ego being taken to task.
The muscled frame in which the album ripples soon returns to its demure state, graceful, an output to which the giant is joined by the strength of the patient virtuosos, the grace and the intelligent thought that has gone into each track is simply pure and devastatingly creative.
Where The Action Is where you will find The Waterboys, getting stuck in, right at the heart of the engagement, you would not want them anywhere else.
Ian D. Hall