Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Faces, like attitudes, like opinions, like life, can change in a heartbeat, we don’t always know what’s coming, what lays in front of us, all we can hope for is that the potholes are avoided, that if the wind alters direction we are not cursed with an expression that can be considered to have turned on the crowd, and instead is open, passionate, fruitful, and above all, ready to offer something of ourselves that is unique, cool, and is utterly, devastatingly, incredible.

Changing Faces, removing a mask perhaps that has been enjoyed by the populace but which you wish to exchange, alter the narrative so you can be seen in a fresh light; a light that widens the stage, that reveals so much more about you, and by doing so you revolutionise the belief in your expression so that it matches your creative and beating heart absolutely.

One of Liverpool’s most engaging, enduring, and positively charming groups, Paul Dunbar & The Black Winter Band, have taken the music, if it were possible, up another notch, and in their brand new album Changing Faces, the sense of drama is pushed, impelled by gravitas, driven by sheer intensity, to a place where the sound and the lyrics are so dynamic that they shake the dust of the listener and set in motion the tremendous outpouring of love that radiates around each track.

It is not enough to want to change, you must be prepared to feel the revolution, to embrace it even unconsciously; you night not realise it yourself, but in others the shift in dynamic is one that makes their face broaden; where you were highly thought of, you become indispensable, you become the face of the new arrangement.

Changing Faces is without doubt, sublime. Across tracks such the openers Dead Inside and Anywhere, and through sonic masterpieces such as Kick ‘Em While They’re Down, Dangerously Good, 1 in 7 agree, Addicted, Mercy, and the album title track, Changing Faces, Paul Dunbar & The Black Winter Band have taken on what might have been impossible, to stand out front and transform the scene around them; already intensely cool, they have found a place where with this album, they are a phenomenon. 

An album of magnetism, of heartfelt drama and fierce musicianship, Changing Faces is a piece of extraordinary companionship.

Ian D. Hall