My Review: Crooked Mouth -Between The Fool And The Magician

 Crooked Mouth -Between The Fool And The Magician 

How beautiful are the souls who travel to put small stones under their shoes and big thoughts in their beats.

Ian Campbell is one of those: he took what was necessary, left his Canada and went to Lithuania, to civilise his desires, to meet people who could be new transmitters, new lakes with jumping, joyful fish inside a new consciousness.

And the result is a fabulous album, full of folk oscillations, tinged with shadows and stories for a thousand voices that rise to the sky.

Characters for a voyage within a voyage to make emotions rise in the listener as they wait and then, slowly, emerge. Stratagems, medieval tricks perhaps, for sure we breathe the air of spirituality with the light on: everything is visible as well as audible and it is necessary to emphasise how this vapour rises from the plains to touch the hill of our thoughts, suspended, at times even a little worried, as there is always a quota of certainty that is certified in the expectation of sudden fragrances...

The autumnal atmosphere lingers throughout the record, and we seem to be listening to a complex affair, with a continuous labyrinth in the mind of the protagonist, which throws itself like an echo into our mental paths.

We have the sensation of hearing at certain moments some Neo-Folk protagonists smoking the pipe of peace, under whiskey-filled blankets. 

Quotas of imaginative sweetness surround these instruments assembled to make the clouds reach their need to expand their limits upwards, and all this makes for a race in the album towards a spirituality that separates the mind from the body, because the latter cannot fly.

Ian is brave, decisive, elegant, bound to the American Folk tradition, but aware that his journey had to lead to the acquisition of new ideas and this happens, not by magic but by his open mind. Instead, the magic can be heard and seen as the nine compositions pass through our concentration, which is in considerable danger of becoming adoration. The sound is warm, the chills are emotional, and tepid is the love that lingers on the skin after taking this work into the surrounds of our breaths.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th April 2023

https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/album/between-the-fool-and-the-magician