Memories –  Damian Sage  (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Music can be something frivolous, something throw away, a thing to be experienced and then forgotten. Of course it can – art for art’s sake and all that. But you could make a great argument for music to have a more important function than that, that it can offer something deeper, more insightful, more, well, worthy. Daman Sage makes that very argument just by making his music and it is a best encapsulated in a brilliant quote from the man himself, “I sing for the lost souls, the hopeless, the castaways, the misunderstood, the sad, the angry. Because I am them and they are me. That’s why I sing.”

This is music which explores the human condition, its highs and lows, the loves, losses and longings of life, the successes, the failures and everything in between. Musically it comes on like a wall of dark, acoustic driven rock, revealing and poignant and although it takes as its subject the darker strands of the this mortal coil, it is melancholic rather than miserable, a discussion about life rather than wallowing in self pity.

Memories is a great song, and it fits right into the upsurge of artists making music which wishes to explore social comment again, a reaction perhaps to both the vacuous nature of the music industry and the gathering clouds which seem to be looming on the horizon. There is strength in understanding each other, in offering a shoulder to cry on, in being there for each other and for all its shade and intensity, songs like this remind us that we are not alone.