It was evident when I reviewed Catch the Breeze last month that they are deep thinkers and NMC will always find a place for those.
Their previous single, ‘Glass Prism’, also a track on this eight track album, dealt with the thorny topics of diversity and community. They shouldn’t be thorny but as I mentioned at the time, just after the riots here which saw over 1,000 people imprisoned for many years with 1,700 hardened criminals released to make way for them, sometimes the two don’t go hand in hand and that track turned out to be particularly apposite at the time.
For their focus track on the album (their third) that they subsequently released on 13th September Catch the Breeze chose the title one, ‘Hope has a place’.
The message in ‘Hope has a Place’ is that hope comes before action and that space needs to be created for it to take hold. Accordingly, an open arrangement predominates, but one that breaks down, suggesting the hiatus that will often take place in such scenarios, before it is haltingly restored, becoming a common musical riff that represents a common message.
Pardon me for being a Contrary Mary this Saturday morning but that’s not quite how I hear it. I discern no hiatus, rather a slowly building degree of confidence that the hope will be realised eventually and I would argue that the video (see below) mostly supports that supposition in the way it deftly juxtaposes humans, both old and young, the animal world and nature in harmony.
It is telling, I think, that the only angst demonstrated in the video (and it isn’t assuaged, at all) comes from the old man, who descends into desperation towards the end, seemingly crying “help” as he collapses in despair.
Songs and accompanying videos like this can be read into any situation. Favourites right now must be the Ukraine war and the disaster that is the Middle East, the “blood-soaked lands of the Prince of Peace” to quote my favourite oxymoronic observation from P J O’Rourke.
But it’s actually easier, again, to relate them to the situation right here in the UK now where older people face a grim future in what is still, remarkably, the world’s sixth largest economy, and are, day by day, running out of hope.
A flower may bud at the end of the video, but it won’t do for them.
It’s all down to personal interpretation at the end of the day and it is to the credit of Catch the Breeze that they have the ability to convey and impress upon you a concept that they may not have even anticipated themselves.
Musically, I didn’t try to pigeonhole them last time and I’m reluctant to do so now but on this song at least they come across as the thinking man’s U2. As they are a trio, how about U3?
The band has been/is touring Denmark and Sweden in September with Film School (USA).
Photo credit Anders Örtegren
Find them on:
Website: https://catchthebreeze.dk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CatchTheBreezeofficial
