Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

A story of two halves, a tale of two distinctive eras made whole by the subject matter’s intense drive and personality welding them together, connecting them by the sound of a voice so powerful that the listener cannot but help but be entranced by the siren of a Californian call, of transferring an energy from surfside punk pop to a queen whose majesty is reflected in the second half of her career and so expertly, so boldly envisaged in the release of the box set Belinda Carlisle: Decades – Volume 2.

There is a fine division between that in which the two box sets that make up Decades, one that insists on the regale and momentum in the post Go-Go’s break up and the dominance that the American sweetheart and girl-next-door attitude placed upon the charts, and to that which served prominence in the next, and final studio albums, spanning from 1993’s Real until Wilder Shore, released some 24 years later; and that division, that line that separates is down to remarkable growth in spirit. No longer the girl next door and sweet as American Pie, but a queen in her own right, sophistication having been gained, and a sense of remarkable resurgence that was willing to break boundaries.

Where Volume 1 was about the pop and the underlying hedonism of youth, the second batch of four albums that were published are ones of a more tempered character, a woman who has looked life in the eyes and owned a maturity that few people find in their life, and it is a remarkable transformation, but one still steeped in the ethos of truth to which she always stood deeply for.

Taking in the albums Real, A Woman & A Man, Voila, and Wilder Shores, Belinda Carlise’s latter period is one defined by the willingness to embrace a bilingual cohesive and a spiritualism framed by the adoption of Sikh chants. In Voila, at the time her first album in a decade, the courage to tackle classic French Chansons and pop standards in French, driven by her move to the country is outstanding, and whilst  not appreciated fully at the time, shows a spirit of defiance, an urge to not be defined by the past, but to sing with an unnamed truth that could not be captured in her own language.

Again, that courage was seized in Wilder Shores and an album that arguably bought out a fierceness of belief in her voice and actions. To bring Punjabi to the fore, to unveil a set of music and inspirations to a fanbase that might rebel in their own way against her choices of music is not only brave, but daring, brilliantly valiant, and absolutely, creatively, fearless.

Two volumes of work, the same woman, the same performer, but wonderfully different and passionately resilient; this is Belinda Carlisle in full flow as an artist, one willing to defy expectations and the norm by crossing a cultural divide imposed by a society who insists people remain where they first found them for their own comfortable ideology and thought.

Ian D. Hall