Nevergreen / Download by Peter Daltrey & Damien Youth

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http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/3335662-nevergreen


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The Nevergreen album is so special, it's so creative, and the guitar of Damien makes you miss Eddie Pumer's non-presence less. In many ways this is the follow-up to White Faced Lady, although I didn't think of it as that in the first place, being so connected to English medieval and ancient history. A true piece of art, probably of the kind that usually gets its recognition many years later.

Knut Skyberg.

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Nevergreen is remarkable in several ways. The obvious point to make about this album is that twenty years ago it would not have been made, or at least not made in this fashion. This is a partnership of distance, made possible by the technological revolution. How many artists in the all embracing field of popular music hit an artistic high three and a half decades after their first recording adventure?

Make no mistake, an artistic high for Peter it most certainly is. This is a very intense album, albeit the music is predominantly acoustic based and folkish in influence. The story is fascinating in a magical, fantastic way, successfully keeping banality and sentiment at arms length. There will be claims that Nevergreen is nothing more than White Faced Lady moved back several hundred years but that would be wrong I feel. There are similarities of course, but most writers pursue familiar themes throughout the course of their careers, so it is only to be expected that Peter should retain certain elements from the work which has been generally acknowledged as the best that he has been previously involved with. I feel that the plainest difference between Angel and Betheny is in the way that they effect the lives of others. Angel moves through the White Faced Lady album like a spectral presence that touches the souls of the other characters in a sub-concious fashion--in other words Angel has no control over her 'power' and in fact she probably is unaware of it's existence. Betheny knows that she is special from the very beginning, and she knows that everyone else in the village knows........ The way that she uses her 'power' eventually causes her 'downfall' and it could be said that she has only herself to blame, whereas Angel was always the 'victim' through seemingly no fault of her own. There is though a link between the two girls, in that both of them are 'in love'. So, are the consequences of Bethany's fateful decision to comply with the Butterfly Boy's request any different to those arising from Angel's equally doomed affair with Jon?

At this point I would like to move on to the contribution of Damien. It would be very remiss of me not to praise his guitar playing and compositional skills. The guitar themes are the foundation stones upon which most of the album tracks are built, but for me, the most important factor regarding the guitar is that it actually 'sounds' like a guitar. That probably comes across as a very obvious and rather foolish statement, but what I mean by it is that the guitar sounds like a natural instrument that is made of wood rather than being plastic or some such man-made material. It sounds like a guitar which has absorbed the sweat of a thousand hours of playing, of a million tunes, a piece of the player himself. It sounds like acoustic guitars used to sound on record back in the 60s and early 70s. The nimble picking is like a mountain spring tumbling down from the heights to the plains, nourishing the village and our ears in the process.

Favourite individual tracks? Difficult to choose but 'The Girl' has a more commercial , irresistible hook than just about any song that you've heard in the charts for donkey's years. 'God's Circled Stones'--Pagan Rant! Spoken word tracks have a reputation for being rather ridiculous and pompously overblown. No such problems throughout this album. Peter has a mesmerising, hypnotic delivery--as precise as his singing. 'Hammers and Nails'--this could have been on 'From Home To Home'! Intense, dramatic--the whole album builds up to this climax in much the same way as 'WFL' gathered pace towards 'Freefall' and the succeeding tracks.

Finally a plea to the two gentleman concerned. Please carry on with this long-distance love-affair. The potential in this partnership is there for all to hear in this album. It would be tragic if this were to be a one-off release. It would be even more tragic if this music doesn't reach the number of ears that it deserves to.

Mick Capewell.