Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

A small raised voice is often lost in a world full of soundbites and political dogma, the drive to creating a nation, a society which doesn’t think, doesn’t read for pleasure, has no understanding of art, music, of interaction with the dark feelings that lead to the exposure of light is happening around us…it is an ugly, flat, agitating on the subservient, beige intoxicating fundamental march to a place with no imagination, a lack of creativity, and the only sculptures being raised are those to whom are approved by government and drawn by public appeal.

This is no threat; it is a descent into an intimidating madness that is being carried out by the wrong end of society’s social structure. The question that we should be asking is where is the beauty of the individual, where are those to whom we must witness having suffered like the artists of old who then become heroes, not stars or celebrities who have been blessed from on high, but down to earth legends who drew the artistic sword from out of the rock and registered as ones not as idols, but marvels who drew inspiration from the Beautiful Ugly.

Those who determinedly take on the brutal truth of their situation, whether it be in the form of an illness, of family disruption, or even attacks by institutions who favour the crass handsome looks of the easily malleable, they are the soldiers who fight to remind the listener and voyeur alike that the to be appreciated you have, you must, have fought the ugly at some point; and so it is to the brilliance of Captain of the Lost Waves that his latest album, one born of absolute dogged fight and roaring defiantly at the tempest’s  aggressive stance, is a huge and defining presence in a world besotted by the gullibility of polished and manufactured automatons.

Beautiful Ugly is stirring, it raises the blood, it fights keenly on the side of imagination; the drama held within each dedicated rooting out of the truth is honestly played, and the result as songs such as the impressive opener of Obsidian Whispers, the generous Success in Failure, Gothic Ballader, Vesper Flights, and the album title track of Beautiful Ugly, the sensuality, the upmost vulnerability, the desire to drown the negativity as though it is a darkness spirit eating away at the foundations of love, respect, and order, is overwhelmingly, brutally, cool.

An absolute treat of an album, Beautiful Ugly is to be recognised as the proof of artistic endeavour and success over adversity.

Ian D. Hall