Liverpool Sound and Vision 8.5/10

When you are young, when adult authority perhaps means something, the pointed finger and verbal accusation of Growing Wild was one that might make you stop and think, careful not to upset those that mean something to you, you rein in the storm, you prune back the excess, as one would a garden allowed to spread out of control, and you restore the balance of contentment. The trouble is you then deny yourself the chance to be the storm that changes the landscape, you become part of the background in which everybody is the same, you don’t blossom into the natural you.

Growing Wild is a privilege, growing wild is to be part of the storm that shakes the settled dust out of the garden, there may be beauty in symmetry, however it does not capture the imagination in the same way as an image that is allowed to be natural, to be refreshingly instinctive and alluding to the environment that it is placed within and alongside.

For Yvonne Lyon, the depth of this passionate wildness is sincere, affected by her own thoughts, she gauges each song as one would with a set of pruning scissors, happy and content to let the song evolve naturally and without the need to dismember or disarm the thorns that may appear on the roses, knowing full well they add character to the appearance, and make you hold the delicate flower of music that is offered with tenderness.

There is such depth to Yvonne Lyon’s work that the emotions evoked as she performs tracks such as the album opener Winter Ground, the refined Insignificant As Stars, Chasing The Silence, Sail On, the elegant and hard hitting A Bigger Heart and the finale of We Accumulate The Years that the collaboration between Ms. Lyon and artists such as Boo Hewerdine, Beth Nielsen Chapman and the poet Stewart Henderson on the album, is an added extra, a secret plot in itself which only adds harmony to the wildness of the garden shown by the landscaper of art.

Yvonne Lyon refuses to lay back in the deckchair of life and just gaze serenely at what she has put together, there is the undeniable feeling of more wildness to come, and it is one that the listener respectfully understands will be delivered with a serenade, with pleasure; for where the wild things grow, there is harmony.

Ian D. Hall