Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The lure of darkness is not only for those who feel the pain of eternal light blinding them, it is also for those who see the beauty in the shade afforded to them, the brisk walk and the occasional saunter through worlds that are dimmed by nightfall, but which are the highlight of glorious imagination allowed, urged, to run wild.

You must be brave to withstand the dark, but in the hours that you spend in the Grieving Sea and the inconsolable caves, there comes a point where bravery is replaced by acceptance, by understanding, and whether it leaves your soul devastated or buoyant with charm, that is the place in which you discover your ambience and balance

It is in the highly articulate and unpolished realm of Grieving Sea that the album Donewiz comes into being, an apparition created by the mists of the squall, turned real, made exquisite and full of faultless anguish to which the genre of their choice is gratefully accepting of.

Not so much tracks and songs, but meanings, aural proverbs, spell like aphorisms which conjure images in the dark and which guide the listener to the place between shade and illumination. From the album opener of Death In, Death Out, A Vacuum, And In The End, the entrancing The Sea Devours, and My Soul In Dunwich, Donewizis the amalgam of the unsettling, honest intent, and fierce romantic allusion, and the history of coastal erosion surrounding British sea faring towns which sees old ghost like places return to the public conscious; this is the place where darkness meets the living, where the soul is swept away in a torrent of music that has the sea as its inspiration and one which is in the end, unescapable.

An album that speaks of the confidentiality that is exposed as the secrets of the sea resurface, the mixture of tones and voices is an innermost portrayal of time, and one that which Grieving Sea unveil with dynamic and unending belief.

Ian D. Hall