Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

You can signal all you want the reasons of desire but if you don’t make it clear enough then you will always fall into the realm of bad habits, rather than experiencing the pastures which feed the New Ways of thinking.

Montreal’s Leif Vollebekk has found that place in which the different approach is one of virtue and disregards cynicism, and in his follow up to the album Twin Solitude, what comes across is a series of commentaries but with the edge of virtue attached to them, a voice that edges between the strength of truth carried by the likes of Leonard Cohen and the beauty that was gifted to Art Garfunkel and a set of songs that are to be held as if placed in your hands with care, to nurture and to set free.

Desire is natural but what you must not do with the emotion is regret it, or to feel ashamed of it, certainly not when it comes to placing your emotions and your state of being in the arms of one you hope to trust.

We can take solace in such actions, the conversation turns in which we reveal our darkest held secrets and the images in which our eyes reflect beauty, we abandon the dark grey shade that clouds our vision and instead see what could be as ruby red and hues of green mix freely with our pattern of thought. It is to this end that Leif Vollebekk offers the listener his thoughts, engaging them with tales and raw lyrics, the sadness and the melancholy performing alongside the rarefied and the demanding. Desire is after all the encompassing feeling of change, for the soul, for the mind, to be something else, to embrace the new.

Across songs such as the opener The Way That You Feel, Hot Tears, Transatlantic Flight, I’m Not Your Lover and the finale of Apalachee Plain, Leif Vollebekk stirs the imagination and holds out a hand in which the listener should take hold of, not to be saved, or belief that they are being offered protection but to join in and make a stand, to declare their own desires and never mind those that snigger or pout in disbelief, for desire seeks out the regretful and turns them inside out, it takes issue with the penitent and speaks out against the doggedly uncomfortable and soon makes them whole once more.

An album that speaks volumes, but which does so with sincerity at its heart, New Ways are a coming, we just have to admit that we need them.

Leif Vollebekk’s New Ways is out now and available from Secret City Records.

Ian D. Hall