Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It doesn’t take a sailor or a mythical creature who guides many a doomed soul to the jagged, unforgiving rocks, to sings Songs Of The Sea, for those waves that either gently lap at the shore and thrill sun bathers as they bathe their sand crusted feet, or the kind that turn rogue or episodic which can crash into the side of a cliff with devastating results, at the end of the day still produce the same effect, the erosion of the land with the help of time.
Ian David Green’s full debut album, Songs Of The Sea, is one of exploration, of deep introspection laid bare, and one that captures the muse in the shape of his late father with style, with grace, with honesty; and as with the erosion of the land by the rogue waves and the surges of water from an ever tempestuous sea, so the mind is sensitive to what it perceives and witnesses in the surge of time in those they love and admire, the gradual loss, the understanding that you may have to let go of the physical land, but you can honour it in song and in markers in the waters of their memory.
The album is a cadenced reminder of the relationship between us all, and that of the affection and caution we have of that watery body, that which protects us danger, that which can feel overwhelming should we fall too deep into its cold but inviting grip. The songs of the sea surround us, they are in the stories told to us as children, they are the warning tales with sirens as both heroes and the adversaries who supply the outcome and is to this that Ian David Green pushes himself into an extraordinary position, one of the balancing acts of beauty and suppressed anger made glorious in its retrospective and hope for the future.
With songs such as the excellent Submarines, Born Under A Northern Light, Tall Ships, The Voyage Of The Queen Marie, After The Flood and On Applecross Ridge, Ian David Green, with tremendous support from the likes of Will Fry, Phil Alexander, Marcus Britton and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, has produced not only something special, but one that honours those lost in time, to the sea of memory that engulfs us all. Beautiful, haunting, full of depth and feeling, Ian David Green’s album is a buoyant vessel in which to keep afloat your emotions until you see land.
Ian D. Hall