MIKE REINSTEIN - Acts Of Love
Irregular Records IRR110
It is a given that we can never get or give enough love, or show enough. And thus an album called Acts Of Love should clearly be manna from heaven for this reviewer, and thus be just what the doctor ordered.
And let me say that lest your definition of the word love be too narrow, this album runs the gamut of the emotion. Its subjects range from the opening track - 24/7 Care – on that noble breed of heroes called carers, to the final track On Our Way where, if things go to plan, one has come to love one’s impending death, and learned to see it as the start of a whole new journey.
En route we encounter I Love Everything You Do (the unabashed love of an artiste for another’s work); The Gardener Of Aleppo (a hymn of praise to the well documented love of that doomed gardener in Aleppo who moved us all on our televisions with his love of mankind and fantastic stoicism and lack of bitterness); and Dear Mr Beckett (with the little known story of Samuel Beckett’s compassion for a neighbour’s child who suffered from gigantism and prejudice: a child who later became Andre The Giant, the famous wrestler).
My verdict? It is a very pleasurable third album from Mike, with Seaford Song, his Memory Lane visit to his First Love, as the standout track...even if he does accidentally owe a debt to the melody of Vince Clarke’s 1982 Yazoo hit Only You.
www.mikereinstein.co.uk
Dai Woosnam
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