Cerrone, DNA. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The best albums invoke memories, the same as all art, if it captures a moment in your mind where you can understand, where you can feel the empathy in your soul, then that it is that your DNA springs to life and fizzes with excitement at the images or sounds that once enraptured your heart.

Whilst Cerrone’s music leaning might be considered far from the shores adopted and lovingly preserved by Pink Floyd, there is no doubt his new and entirely instrumental album, DNA, is honoured by the various pulses of life that had inhabited the seminal British progressive rock band’s own personal bones and blood, seemingly capturing the ear of the forever and whispering to the genes of the genre without shame and with pleasure.

An instrumental album asks a great deal of the listener, far from being a set of songs to which the lyrics urge you to identify with the feel of the album, instead what is strikingly posed is the question of what you yourself would transpose in between the notes, how you would see the silent movie play out for you by creating the dialogue. After all, this approach no longer relies on memories, it becomes about the imagination, how such words can infiltrate the psyche to the point where they can be sung in your head as the music offered controls and sways your mood.

It comes down to impact, and it no surprise that Cerrone makes use of this in his album, and in tracks such as the magnificent opener, The Impact and through moments of sheer depth in Air Dreaming, I’ve Got A Rocket, Close To The Sky and the album’s title track DNA, impact is where the album lands, the crater it creates is not one of dust and destruction, but of new born life that comes out to greet you; the genetic material to which life itself holds fast.

Absolutely effective, brimming with ideas and passion, DNA is a sequence of tracks that get underneath the skin beautifully.

Cerrone release DNA on 7th February on Malligator via Because Music.

Ian D. Hall