Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

It is only time that separates us from the misery and fear of the 1930s. The signs are there if you wish to acknowledge them, but for most the desperation, the scale of distress, is only something happening to other people, and whilst the ripples are getting larger, whilst the wake catches more in its increasing net, so the denials of the larger picture become louder, more vociferous, more intense.

If you want to understand how the situation is engulfing the soul, you only must realise how desperate good people are getting and what they will consider doing to keep their lives intact.

Breaking My Bones, it is not just a sign of the times, it is a systematic and continual attack by successive governments and ideologies to wear down the psyche of all peoples, to divide when unity would be more beneficial, to install panic where responsibility should prevail, and the damage has come to a fore as all around the world innocent people are pushed deeper into debt, goaded into making decisions that they believe, that they hope, will solve their problems…the cost is too high, not one life is worth being lost to want, not one life should be threatened because of national insecurity.

This is the point driven home with sincerity, with fierce polish by Alan Triggs, and whether you are someone who insists on the drama of a video to make sense of a song, or the kind of person who feels each line, each note struck as keenly as if it was vibrating in their soul, Alan Triggs reaches via both expressions of media and produces a track that is touches, that rightfully expresses the anger of the time, and which perhaps offers a solution to the sense of existential dread we are feeling, that we can say no, no to excess, no to consumer driven jealousy, that we can shake our heads and demand better but in such a way that does not depend on the commercial satisfaction.

The track is full of muscle, it ripples with vibrancy, it dares people to take a wrong step in the fight against fear, for he asks with beautiful impertinence that we stop fighting ourselves and demand that the world be changed, not with more excess, but with satisfaction that we can do better, that even if we fall, that forgiveness is what matters in the end.

Breaking My Bones is a tremendous single, a song not for the plastic thinker, but one that that is substantial, full of girth and width, and one that is truly admired.

Ian D. Hall