Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Time will throw you a curve ball when you aren’t paying attention, a moment to which you pray to your personal god, to which you clutch the artifact of your chosen personal canonised confessor and whisper to them all the sins of neglect you have found your guilty of committing, for in the search for absolution in the mind of The Patron Saint of Heartache one must concede that life’s rich opera doesn’t always show you what you needed to witness the first time round.
Perhaps that phrase has never been more true that when hearing Liverpool’s Candy Opera, a band who have been noted by many as a classic example of the second wave of the golden period of the city’s overwhelming music scene, and whilst we can all name the bands around them at the time, the songs that captured the heart of a nation in a period when the city was left to fall by the so called powers that be in the Westminster circus, it seems that one of the finest was left to be shamefully ignored by the wider world.
Looking back at their music at the time of release, it was outrageously good, but then that is perhaps where the band’s first new set of songs in thirty years, The Patron Saint of Heartache, stands out, the withstanding of past anguish, beaten and speared, taken for what it was and then rebalanced, readjusted and reappraised, heartache replaced with a sense of elation and honest bliss, one that takes a firm swipe at the way we have had our current times thrust upon us, a situation to which we believe we have had control over, but to which we have ignored the obvious signs of deranged double dealing by those with alternative goals.
With tracks such as Tell Me When The Lights Turn Green, Start All Over Again, Five Senses Four Seasons, Freedom Song, the excellent Hashtag Text Delete, Gimme One Last Try and See It Through Your Eyes and utilising superbly The Wild Swans’ Paul Simpson on backing vocals on a couple of songs, Candy Opera have returned at a pivotal moment in the history of the country, for in the depth of disquiet, we must embrace the understanding that support is necessary and essential to remove the heartache that punishes the ordinary to the point of suffocation.
A performance of entertainment fuelled by the search for truth; three decades on this patron saint has got our best interests at heart.
Candy Opera’s The Patron Saint of Heartache is released on 13th November via A Turntable Friend Records.
Ian D. Hall