Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

To blaze a trail of your own making can leave you feeling lonely, it can add pressure to your vision to strive to create something that nobody on Earth could imagine, could build, and that loneliness of feeling can be overwhelming, can leave you looking at the bugs that flutter around Streetlights on the highway and wondering if conformity is all that bad; for after all the crowd seems to have more fun being in the realm of illumination.

To be fierce and embrace uniqueness is to understand that those who seek salvation in the crowd are often lost, they are only attracted to the fire, never to the creation, and in the streetlights, they surrender themselves to what they believe is the sun in full smouldering radiance.

Uniqueness is the hunting ground of The Whiskey Charmers, and on their fifth studio album, Streetlights, the sense of understanding the human soul perhaps takes a great stride in being explained, the deep and gratifying pleasure of melancholy is an honesty derived from extracting the pulse from a flame that puts the lamppost into the shade; and as Carrie Shepard and Lawrence Daversa weave together songs of sensual purity with a huge dollop of the uplifting Americana, what can be observed is the continual strive to being unlike anyone else currently plying their trade and greeting the listeners with songs of quality reassurance.

With special guests John Porter, Daniel Ozzie Andrews and David Roof giving the extra dimension within the production, tracks such as Whiskey, It Was Made For Drinking, Sagebrush, the excellent Little Green Man, Time Bomb, New Song For Sale, and the telling signals of the finale Stars, Streetlights is that illumination  made real, it harvests and utilises the presence of the true warmth with the dynamic pair, it exudes and animates with its presence, and those creatures of the night only ever drawn to the falsehood are soon left behind, for in high spirits, in the uniqueness of inner essence Whiskey Chamers are of the top shelf pick.

Charmers by nature, this is an album for the discerning and playful palate.

Ian D. Hall