Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Time takes Time, only when the moment is right does the Muse look at their watch, smile beguilingly at the sculptor of dreams and precision, and make good on the promise to aid in the delivery of what is seen as art, what is the final expression of doubt and the beginning of an eternal voice occupying its time in history.

Those Small Talk Songs, the moments of introspection and speculation, those are the delicate brush strokes on the canvas, the tiny taps of the chisel, and the ponderings of the poet searching for the right word to add dynamism, to add grief, to the ode; and it is in those unseen seconds that that the mark of genius is laid out for the viewer, the listener, the lay person, to witness.

You can have the endless debate, the open-ended philosophical question looming over a dinner party, but is in small talk and the songs that are memorised line for line, where the real pieces of life’s jigsaw are slotted into the frame; this is where the genius resides, the connections between subjects and words, and one that we are all capable of achieving, but which takes progression and unrelenting Time to reveal.

Time takes Time…and yet in the debut album by Danny Bradley, time is effervescent, it beautifully harmonises the Small Talk Songs with technique harnessed in the procession of others as they acknowledge, quite rightly, his addition to their releases, and in the wake of a period when the world and its people have been patiently counting out time, Danny Bradley has utilised his Muse’s clock with precision, with extraordinary belief, and a keen eye for the detail on the musical canvas.

Across tracks such as the opener If Ever He Blinks, All Over The Floor, the superb and social illustration of the disparity between worlds of Michelin Star, Balcony Birds, Shady Grove, Sittin’ On Top Of The World and the heart- rendering song Bargain, Danny Bradley is such inspired form that the Muse must surely look to him for guidance, rather than the other way round.

This first full-length debut is an album of lyrical mischievousness wrapped up in the artistry of the often-demanding grief filled world in which we circumnavigate with all our might; rich in its depth, outstanding in its delivery, pleasing in its beauty, Danny Bradley’s Small Talk Songs is a presentation of Time and a tune in union.

Ian D. Hall