Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Reflecting on your family history is for many a journey that is not satisfied until you have walked the same path, undertaken the same trials and tribulations that was demanded upon of them. The route may appear different, time has a way of making even the greenest valley become littered with weeds and the tangle of roots ready to catch your determined feet, and yet we continue to amaze others, as well ourselves, by honouring the path to the point where the music we hear along the way becomes a theme tune to ours, and those who walked before us, life.

For Carus Thompson, it is the reverse of his Grandfather’s journey from England to Australia that gives his latest album its reason for looking back, of understanding that our own journey is not that far removed from our nearest and dearest, our friends and those to whom we hold in admiration, because it really isn’t about the destination, but how we get there that is the key to life.

Taking a walk with his family’s memories firmly at the forefront of his mind, Shakespeare Avenue is more than just a set of songs bound together by a topic, it is the realisation that our own narrative is just a single chapter in an endless and fruitful novel, that our loves, our hopes and dreams are not only tied to what has been, but what drives us on to create new life, responses and expressions of beauty.

It in the character of both the man and the songs that Shakespeare Avenue takes a firm grip of the imagination of the listener, and as songs such as the opener Ship To Come In, Avondale Heights To Sunshine, Unless We Go Now and the divine Land’s End more than delight and maintain such impeccable standards of observation and writing, so it is to our own memory of understand what drove our family onto the path entails.

To be inspired by someone else’s understanding of what is within our D.N.A., what marks us out and makes us what we are, is to be held aloft as a truth, that we must acknowledge our past to make our own story even greater. A truth held for all to listen to in a series of captivating and intriguing songs by Carus Thompson.

Carus Thompson’s Shakespeare Avenue is out now and available from Valve Records.

Ian D. Hall