Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Those attractive forces that bind us together, a wicked game they conceive when they know we will fall for the art that comes our way.

Ma Polaine’s Great Decline sees the Somerset pairing of Beth Packer and Clint Hough return to the music lover’s attention with their brand new studio album, Molecules, and it is with ever open arms and fondness for the uniquely sounding artists that the public will offer for the spiritual heroes of the dark introspection and commitment of the mix and jazz and blues/folk one of joy; those attractive forces once more in the hands of masters of story telling with song form.

It’s almost as if the stars are permanently aligned, that the words, poetic features on a background of often indescribable beauty and fascination come forth when listening Ma Polaine as she reclines in her chaise longue and recounts tales designed to gather the emotions of the listener and smile as she takes pleasure in the effect on the heart.

Molecules is no different, it’s ability to pull the listener in with a poetic vision that would make Kerouac make cause for celebration and Thomas reach for a drop of his usual in admiration; for in the pursuit of describing the human condition, of unearthing the reasons we find in companionship or in its equal that of solitude and perhaps neglect, the music encases and pulsates with a seismic tremor, a cascade of thoughts rising and eventually surfacing as a heart-embracing discovery.

An album that tempts, teases, boils with anticipation, and which delivers on its promise to wring each emotion out is to be savoured, and as tracks such as the openers of Jars and Rivers set the standard, so then Back When You Loved Me, Alone, Audrey, and Blame It On Me, that promise is not only kept but it is justified and pushed to the very front of the aural experience.

This is poetry in action, this is an album comfortable with its lyrical dominance, and the fierce nature of its conviction, but ultimately it is the sound of a smooth engine purring at its most efficient and ravishing best.

All stories in the end are but fragments of a greater whole, but it is in the attraction that bids that gives them clarity and vision; a sense of the divine that Ma Polaine’s Great Decline have worked feverishly to behold.

Ian D. Hall