Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are theories, wild speculations, and plausible philosophies that suggest that civilisation has started to eat itself, that we are living in a period of time damned by its own intelligence and appeasement to the cracks in the social construct; that our reality is a blind alley to which we have become accustomed and that is grinding on the rails towards its own inevitable destruction.
Without Motion, without taking steps now, the sense of inertia will become overwhelming, and as governments of all persuasions around the world lurch to extremes, so that damnation will become a set of principals to beat the populace into further submission. The statement on the lips can come down to attention, that perhaps social media has been the boon, and the realisation that it is the construct of our own demise.
It takes courage to point this out in the artistic world, the backlash could be concerning, and perhaps devastating, but it is a truth that requires debate and understanding, and in this pursuit of conversation the members of the Feral Family strike out and pierce the side of conformity and the side show of the new realms that have come with this slide into inertia, into this rush to accept decay.
Across tracks such as This Side Of Me, Wee Van Bee, Spice King, Cairo, The Mercy, and Fractured, the observations by the band are fierce, unrepentant, forcing the idea of dystopian truths that we have willingly walked headstrong into, and by doing so the music is a force that plays with the synaptic fires in the mind with abundant pleasure and resistance.
In ways we perhaps cannot comprehend without passivity, our evolution has been dogged by allowing technology to not be the revolution we deserve, but one that is a terror driven by its adolescent reasoning; unreasoned, unfailing in its blinkered dreams of that which it reaches out for…control.
An album by a band that is unafraid of exploring in the rubble, one that comes up with gold by doing so. Without Motion is a prime example of what can be achieved when we look deeper into the reasons why our lives have taken a turn backwards on the rails of positive progression.
Feral Family release Without Motion on January 19th.
Ian D. Hall