Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The world has you in its sights every day, the scope of your life is watched and noted down, any sign of vulnerability is used as an advantage over you and your time can be felt as if your spending is swimming against the tide. The expectation of conforming to a set of rules that never make sense is palpable and distracting; yet we still adhere to the idea of kill or cure, as if we are suffering from some insidious disease that requires treatment, that we suffer because we will not be compliant, instead preferring, quite rightly, to be rebellious.
Kill Or Be Kind is the exception, it offers the choice to which compliance is born out of compassion, we understand the person’s point of view and wish to join in the uncontrollable surge of beauty being performed in front of us, revelling in the defiance that exists, that is alive.
Nobody can ever suggest that genre-defying guitarist Samantha Fish is anything but alive, arguably one of the most exciting, provocative and electrifying performers of her generation, the music has come thick and fast, it has been a refreshing course of thought that a musician is constantly recording new songs to bring to the public’s conscious, and one that is always evolving, steeped as she is in the Blues, Ms. Fish manages to reveal a constant shift in her love and roots of the music world.
This approach is felt keenly in Samantha Fish’s new album Kill Or Be Kind, songs that soar, look down upon mountains and look to the horizon with awe, knowing that the edge of the world never arises, it is a continuous journey which the sky isn’t just the limit, it is only the start of a brand-new limit to smash.
Across songs such as the outstanding opener, Bulletproof, Watch It Die, Try Not To Fall In Love With You, the excellent Dream Girl and the consent of doing what feels good for your own sense of self and respect in She Don’t Live Around Here, Samantha Fish takes Kill Or Be Kind to heart, she embodies and breathes the themes, she places the feeling of extraordinary to the listener and implores them to see the signs of virtue that come out of the blocks with guitar defining subtly.
A sublime album, Samantha Fish continues to influence and emphasise artistic consideration.
Samantha Fish releases Kill Or Be Kind on Friday 20th September on Rounder Records.
Ian D. Hall