Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Isolation and alienation are not considered happy bedfellows, but they can be found to be often related via mutual understanding when one person suffers and agonises over pain and virtue in equal hostile measure.

Quite often, the more you push against the two despairing emotions, the harder it is to see yourself as free from the effects and damage they inflict upon you, the separation of spirit and soul they exact, like badly informed justice and deliverance, the casualty and the wounded party often seek to further entrench themselves into the position where Try Harder becomes a verbal punishment designed by those with little empathy and care of understanding.

In isolation we are trapped by our own projections of what the state the world exists, in alienation we are banished, objected to, from contributing, and it is to those words “try harder” that become the chains to which we allow ourselves to lose hopeful control of the situation, a presence of mind to which Aerial East has put her own thoughts to and shows just how difficult it is to be accepted in today’s world when the doors are closed and there are invisible guards hovering around inside your imagination waiting for you to chance an escape; their sight set upon keeping you locked away, bound and caged, with no voice to call your own.

Try Harder is Aerial East’s fight back against the exhaustive rules imposed across the generation, that the individual whose rough edges dismay the those who collaborated with conformity in the hope of an easier ride through life, cannot hope to fight against but attempts to at least meet half way and found common ground in which to reach agreement, and it is that expression of try harder that those who have ever been kicked against will understand that no matter how hard you try, the odds of being accepted become longer and more impossible to achieve.

It is to the emotion of the album that Aerial East fights back, what others might consider to be the broken voice pleading for tolerance, or acknowledging the differences, is in actual fact a roar, the call of the wounded refusing to let the chance go, and in that roar, in that scrap against isolation and alienation, what the listener will find is a kind of healing, of knowing it is okay to be considered the one to who others seek to destroy, to lock away, for the heart of the quarantined is quite often the most truthful, most creative, there is.

That creative urge shows magnificently in tracks such as The Things We Build, the superb Katherine, Angry Man, Jonas Said and Blue, songs of blistering beauty and insight, of offering comfort to those who know it is otherwise in short supply.

A tantalising album, one born out of frustration and inner rage, but also one that offers peace and companionship; commodities in these dark days which are to be treasured.

Ian D. Hall