Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
From Given to Forgiven, the song is always in the moulded, sculptured hands of Simon Cousins. It is a sculpture that is worked upon, that is designed and produced with full heart, from Given to Forgiven, Simon Cousins holds the listener close and asks only that the latest creation is known for its honesty.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The humble compilation album can take many forms. In now what seems at times the dim and distant past, as distant to the younger generation coming through now as Sir Edmund Hilary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest to those growing up in the 1970s, the past when to have your say in music meant taking the pick of the songs you may have proudly bought or even embarrassingly hidden away due to the absurdity of the song and placed onto a C90 tape and perhaps even then handed over with much ceremony to the person you perhaps fancied, the compilation stood for something pure.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Music truly is about opening yourself up, like all art it responds to how you feel on the day, what mood you have climbed out of bed in and how that period of darkness has affected you and your thoughts. For Simon Cousins, once of the Wiltshire Folk rock band Ophiuchus and Liverpool’s own The Onset, the mood he must have come to be in whilst recording the tracks on Given Songs must have been somewhere between serene and tranquil with a little nomadic aside into the realms of tender affection.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Some musicians just radiate warmth and a sort of musical love as soon as they step on a stage. Without even playing a note on a guitar, just by the simple motion of saying hello to a collected crowd, the affection is felt around you. Whoever has come to take in the musician’s work, be it friends, fans or the surprised newcomer, what comes palpably across is the thought that everybody who is watching just wants the musician to succeed. In that respect the warmth felt for Simon Cousins could keep a large town’s heating suppliers out of business for a long while.