Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

It’s the big skies, the vision in many people’s minds that they first come to think of the United States of America as more than large imposing cities that stretch out of sight and the place where the dichotomy of political infighting is beyond their comprehension. These big skies are always blue, seamless, from coast to coast they offer beauty, the landscape of abundant fortitude and meaning; as Jim Morrison once surmised, it’s the country of the stoned immaculate and the big beat.

For those induced into the love of the Americana, it doesn’t matter if those skies occasionally turn inward, produce storms that send the atmosphere black and blue, it is all the same event, the horizon, the vanishing point, is conducted by the same visual orchestra as those who only see the close-up, and this is down to the absolute sense of panorama that the genre and the country holds in the minds of all who seek a space to let their own Black Dog free and escape life in a wilderness of song, observation and prospective joy.

Victor Camozzi’s latest album, Black Dog, is one such escape, but one that has its own map on offer, influenced perhaps by the likes of the poetic stance observed by Jim Morrison, but also of groups such as Eagles, moments of Steve Earle, Gram Parsons and the great Johnny Cash, a musician who knows that the truth lays not in the heavens or in the dust in ground, but somewhere in between, where the eyes will wander and gaze.

Across tracks such the opener Broken Hearts Roll, the excellent Horses I Won’t Ride, the lament of Even The Whiskey, the heartache of introspection in I Can’t Get Away From Me and the marvellous The Wrong Thing At The Right Time, Victor Camozzi details the music with insight, with glorious passion and with melancholic landscape as his canvas; the notes acting like paint on this master’s panoramic context.

Black Dog may mean different things to different people and moods, but in this case, it highlights excellence, it stridently, and confidently evokes images that fill the mind with colour.

Victor Camozzi’s Black Dog is out now and available from Volco Records.

Ian D. Hall