The Glue Ensemble
Album: We Used To Live Around Here
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 13
Website: https://www.facebook.com/TheGlueEnsemble

Perhaps it's Blaine's filmmaker's influence, which allows 'We Used To Live Around Here' to become such a powerful memoir to the past. The narrative literally reaches towards you entwining yourself with another's, a story of loss and strength.

My Morning Pages is slightly uncomfortable to listen to in places, with its jagged edge and yet it is successfully enticing. In parts 'My Morning Pages' and 'The Devil In The Garden' seems so tense you could cut it with a knife thanks to Lyllou Chevalier's 'icy riff'. This album would not look out of place accompanying a film revealing the dark side to the human psyche.

Hinting towards the frustration and anguish of innocent people's suffering or perhaps the death taking a loved one too soon. 'We Used To Live Around Here' is about starting again despite a wall of tragic events determined to send one off track. 'Why do good things happen to bad people happen?' Followed by the line this 'life can be sugar'.

'London Fields' sounds much more like a fragile celebration of certain tangible memories, becoming equally more distant and yet poignant in ones life. More attune to the sound of Damien Rice.

Sometimes this disjointedness sound horrendously. It's getting that balance between ensuring not every track sounds the same and not allowing each track to sound so totally different eleven different artists could produce it. Glue Ensemble pulls it off.

'We Used To Live Around Here' is a blend of acoustic brilliance making you think, making you imagine and making you listen and enjoy. Themes explored in this album could easily appear as a nostalgic photographic document, produced on medium format film.

My favourite track on this album would be the narrative breeze of 'Death Of A Civil Servant.'

Leah Parker-Turnock