Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
We may believe that we have come a long way since the days of receiving a Message From The Gods that will do our world endless good, we have moved away from the spiritual communication, instead relishing in the heart of a hastily written and scrawled memo; we have ignored the advice of poets and instead grasped at the hands of politicians who for the most parts follow their own ideals and whose only knowledge of the divine is the wine they taste and the champagne they waste.
To be profound in the modern world can feel as if you are fighting against a constant stream of discontent, the wise word mentioned as a passing observation, ridiculed, sneered at, mocked and scorned, and yet we quote the simplest of phrases coined in a commercial as if they have been written by the most thoughtful of scribes, W.H. Auden, Frida Kahlo, Leonard Cohen and Kate Tempest; such is the inverted insight that we have arguably turned away from progressing and instead are retreating back into our shells.
For Keith James, the profound and dramatic is an act of consideration and substance, it is possibly one in itself that is also inverted, praising the enlightened as an act of sabotage and glorifying the weighty words in an anarchistic, beautiful fashion.
Message From The Gods is Keith James’ 15th album, and there is no evidence to be found that the power of illumination he strives for has lessened due to time, if anything he has stuck a pin in the very heart of the matter that binds us now, that of false dawns and scant rhetoric; and by immersing himself into the words of the aforementioned W.H. Auden, Leonard Cohen, Kate Tempest, as well Kahlil Gibran, Lorca and Maya Angelou, he has composed generosity and meaning across titles such as poetic and musical encounters such as Tiresias, All My News, Caged Bird, If You Forget Me and Weeping Guitar.
A sweeping encounter that embraces the substantial and relevant, the moment of reawakening to an emotional spiritual side and away from the insensitive echoing voices that comes with the immediate gesture of the dismissive and the missive of ignorance; Message From The Gods is the best of fragility held by our hands.
Ian D. Hall