Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Like riding a bike, once you have mastered an artform it never truly leaves you.

Time passes, sometimes too much for the artist to regain a semblance of balance between what they once produced and to what they wish to explore, to present, in the now; and yet there is the room to which sleep is denied with force, the place where a purpose never rests until it is examined, poured over, and delivered with as much affection and fortitude as once lit up every corner of the artistic apartment at hand.

For Liverpool’s The Room, the welcome is assured, the pleasure undaunting, and despite the 38 years between albums, the sense of culture and passion is beyond expectation.

Restless Fate, the knowledge perhaps that what you strive for will eventually be recognised, even when time has grown long, and the public may only whisper your names in dream like memory of past victories and nights when all they had was the comfort of a song to surround them.

Exulted during the first part of the 1980s as they recorded sessions for the much-missed icons of radio, Janice Long and John Peel, the brightness was cut arguably far too short as the time dictated that they went their separate ways. Yet in a period of time when we can rewind the clock backwards to a point of restoration, Restless Fate goes one better, it gleams with resolution and frankness, the possibility that age does not ruin us, it defines us as articulate beings to whom time has taught us to be open to change; and that fate, it is what it was always going to be…a shaft of light that is brilliant.

Across tracks such as Red Admiral, Kingdom, the reveal of what unfiltered social media has done to our perception of time in Sleepless, The Reeds, and Cursed Islands, The Room is once more filled with a cacophony of sound that asks nothing more than to be heard, and yet we can do more, we must offer the respect the album deserves, for how many of us can return to the scene of greatness after such a long period and still be filled with the rapture we require to even match our previous endeavours…let alone eclipse them.

A terrific return, The Room is primed and ready once more for a party you never saw coming.

Ian D. Hall