Name of Love – Alias Wayne (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

You can never quite be sure what to expect when you drop the needle on an Alias Wayne record, to use some old-school parlance. But you know it will be something well crafted, passionate, honest and pleasing to the ear. And so it is with his latest one, Name of Love, a song running on a soulful, Latin sway and via primal lyricism of an almost spiritual nature that reminds me so much of The Waterboy’s Mike Scott, which can only be a good thing.

Obviously, it’s a song about love, but nothing so cliche or small as the usual boy meets girl stories. This is love writ large, love as celebrated by the glory of nature, love as a universal concept, love as a divine force, a love that we have forgotten, the one that binds every one of us together, in which all answers lay, the sort of answers that might lead to a reconciliation of humanity, with itself, with each other, with the planet, with the universal oneness.

It’s sometimes humbling the power a simple song has over us.