Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

There are those that understand, and then there are those who are wrong. To willingly open up and admit that the soul is suffering is not the act of misery, or the excess of emotions that some will describe as wallowing in self-pity or indulgence, it is heroism, it is accepting that the blues are part and parcel of a life that requires growth after the despair, of the personal unhappiness, and that even to be seen as melancholic is a finer attribute than to be shown as a sneering, unfeeling monster whose appalling lack of empathy for another human being in distress is revealed as those who lack judgment, who only wish to revisit constant harm upon the soul.

Each one has at least one significant moment in our life that comes along when perhaps the creativity is nipping at the ankles and at the mind, we might not all be artists in the strictest sense of the world, but we all have an idea of what beauty is and how we wish to exclaim it from the rooftops. Each one finds surely the opportunity to honour the two conflicting states of emotional pulls the most obvious human thing to do; and so, it is to the generosity of performance that exists in the soul of Sunjay that his memory of the passing of his mother should be placed for eternity in the superbly produced album. Black & Blue Revisited.

Time is recovery, and we how we use it to find ways of expression that were already in the mind but required a deeper sense of understanding to give them the purpose and passage to allow others into the heart, and for Sunjay, that expression is wholesome, bound in momentum, an occupational force that sets in motion the sense of healing. To feel grief is cathartic, and it does not matter how long that takes, it only matters that it happens.

Produced by Sunjay and Josh Clark at Bath’s Get Real Studios, Black & Blues Revisited is the result of standing firm in the winds of change, those moments that test our resolve and our love, and in an album where the artist surrounds themselves with the comfort of others, tracks such as Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues, Brownie McGhee/ Ruth McGhee’s Living With The Blues, Walter Davis’s Come Back Baby, the excellent Freight Train, penned by Elizabeth Cotton, Paul James, and Frederick Williams, and the sublime reading of Dust My Broom, the closeness of the relationship that has slipped into shadow is highlighted in pride, in love, and in honour.

An album that comes out of adversity, but which enriches the soul, this is the Black & Blues Revisited once again, and performed with greatness of spirit. 

Sunjay’s Black & Blues Revisited is out now.

Ian D. Hall