The Paradox Twin follow up The Importance Of Mr Bedlam with an album based on personal experience and laced with classic moments.

Release Date: 8th October

Label: White Star Records

Format: digital / CD

Charging back like there’s no tomorrow, is Progressive Music Award-nominated singer-songwriter Danny Sorrell. He’s at the head of a newly strengthened line-up to The Paradox Twin who has a tremendous progressive tinged album to share.

It’s an album that takes its cues directly from Danny’s personal life experiences. Around the same time as the debut album release and the same time his new son was born, Danny’s eldest was diagnosed with autism. The collision of both positive and negative feelings sparked a train of thought that then became a story told through music and lyrics.

Silence From Signals is a tale of two twin siblings (a neurotypical sister and a neurodivergent brother), and the trials and tribulations they go through trying to navigate the brother’s struggles through life in understanding why he is different. It’s a dark tale, an emotive topic that pulls no punches and avoids a Disney ending. The boy is also abused by his father, becomes outcast for being so different and unfortunately the result is that he ultimately drowns himself.

“I wanted to do something a bit different on the album,” says Danny, “making people aware of something they have probably heard of but don’t know much about, by creating some powerful music and lyrics that will hopefully move people emotionally.”

With John Mitchell providing a guiding light, the album and the music manage to portray the power and the emotion of the subject matter. The two voices, Danny himself taking the male role and Nicole Johnson the female voice provide the contrast and the two viewpoints and there’s a genuine empathy with Danny singing the lines “The world has passed me by…life has passed me by.” You know he’s not just singing words, he’s lived through them.

The combination of atmosphere, interesting sound creations and spoken word parts with the two voices interacting, evokes a claustrophicbic feel and a heightened sense of drama and tension. Not surprisingly, the album dips and dives as the tale evolves, with restained and sensitive arrangements being to the fore and there’s much to admire about the acoustic moods that occupy much of the space.

As we get deeper, the emphasis is one a less is more approach, with each piece crafted with sibtlety and not relying on dazzling technical musicianship, and desperately heavy passages. Even in the eleven minutes of I Am Me I Am Free, the intensity comes more from the interaction between the voices and for the first time, a controlled guitar solo is available to admire and the climax of this centrepiece (along with the slowly building thunder in Prism Descent) is as powerful as anything you’ll hear on Silence From Signal.

Comparsions to the late great Anathema have been bandied about by some of those in the know. There are echoes dotted throughout the album not least in the male/female vocal contrast and the shift in dynamics. There might be no greater compliment, and one which is confirmed in spades in the final piece, Perfect Circles. A slow brooder, an impassioned vocal (the words are particularly telling) and saturated with a rare grace.

From a difficult subject and an unusual inspiration, comes what is a really outstanding album. In a packed marketplace, this is one album I’m glad didn’t pass me by. Packed with slow burning intensity, imaginative writing and played with a genuine passion, Danny Sorrell has a classic on his hands.

Here’s the video for Wake Vortex:

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