Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It does not matter if you have an appetite for it, Destruction is always in the air, it just takes the emboldened hand to hold the right match, and the whole edifice of lies and confusion can come crashing down, destruction of the walls, mayhem ensues, and faith in humanity scattered.
And yet there is another type of destruction that few envisage when they dream of change or altering other’s minds, one that doesn’t call for the course side of the matchbox to be struck, nor the reflected glow of fire to be caught momentarily in the eye as the glee of devastation takes hold, it is the art of persuasion, the gentleness of voice that refuses to be drawn in rhetoric or words of bombast or derogatory expression, it is in that sound of beauty and kindness, of empathy, that destruction can be a permanent advantage and asset to the soldiers wielding art, not dynamite or means to deliver an explosion.
To our shame we laud the aftermath of one with greater ferocious spirit than the other, but in words of beauty delivered with humility and persuasion to which Murph Bower sets an excellent example in his hugely impassioned E.P., Destruction, it is a reversal to which you can do nothing but surrender your time with a heartfelt smile on your face and a song in your own heart.
Murph Bower’s Destruction is one of gentleness, biting words wrapped in an exquisite nature of faith in humanity, but also acknowledging the pain to which we find in dark times, the kind that divides and which can lead to two different roads taken by the soul.
It is to the credit of the musician and songwriter that the road in this case does not lead down the route of aggression but of humanity and as tracks the float on the breeze with enduring hope, the sense of revolution in the hands of care is revealed.
Whether in Cigarettes and Wine, Out Of Reach, The Great Unknown, Times A Healer and the E.P. title track, Destruction, Murph Bower captures a moment to which he deserves absolute credit, for it is a moment set against the insurgency that Time perhaps demanded, instead of creating an explosion, insists that revolutions can be led with a clear, perpetual, guiding voice that calls out in the dark with softness and charm.
Ian D. Hall