Steve Mason "Brothers And Sisters" Blood Records Red Splatter Vinyl 2xLP 62/500

	£		25
	$		33

Steve Mason "Brothers & Sisters"  Blood Records DS145LP  New/Unplayed 2 x Red Splatter Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition, Numbered 62/500, with printed inner sleeves, housed in a gate-fold sleeve, and released in March 2023. The LP is new and unplayed, so is in mint condition.
Steve Mason is a Scottish guitarist, singer, writer, and activist. He came to prominence in the late 90s as the lead singer and one of the founding members of The Beta Band. Mason created King Biscuit Time as a side project during his time in The Beta Band, and then took the name again after the group split in 2004. After a diversion as Black Affair, Mason began his solo career in 2009.
He has now released five solo albums, as well as collaborations with Denis Bovell and Martin Duffy.
"Brothers & Sisters" was recorded during lockdown, in 2020. It steps away from his “radio friendly” style of 2019’s "About The Light", marrying electronic elements with world music. Tom Doyle at Mojo singled out the title track as “a rallying cry to dormant ravers,” and concluded that the album was “a winning beats-driven combination of the personal and the universal.” Daryl Easlea at Record Collector noted that this may well be Mason’s friend and collaborator Martin Duffy’s final appearance on record (after his passing in December 2022) – “a fine way for him to finish, on an album full of intelligence and love.” Nick Roseblade said in Clash Magazine that Brothers & Sisters was “one of his best albums to date."  A ten date UK tour to support the album ran in April and May 2023.
Review for FAR OUT MAGAZINE by Sam Kemp "Since the implosion of The Beta Band in the early ’00s, Steve Mason has barely paused for breath, releasing a string of solo albums under various monikers and building up a devoted fanbase in the process. He’d be the first person to admit that he’s in an unusually fortunate position, and he has no intention of letting it go to waste. Mason’s first full-length album since 2019, "Brothers & Sisters" boasts some of the Scottish musician’s finest material in a decade and serves as a reminder that an artist’s best work is rarely created in isolation.
About The Light saw Mason at his most radio-friendly. “I’d just become a dad, and I felt this sudden weight of responsibility,” he told Far Out in a recent interview. “I realised I was going down this road of chasing radio plays. I was hoping for that BBC Radio 2 playlist.” If not already driving down that road, he certainly had his finger on the indicator and was about to make the turn. Then, suddenly, something dawned on him. “I remembered that I didn’t start making music because I wanted to become a great songwriter; I wanted to be an artist with everything that entails… Writing music should be about stretching yourself.”
"Brothers & Sisters" is, in many ways, a document of Mason’s creative rebirth. Early tracks like ‘Mars Man’ and ‘No More’ are murky and doom-laden but quickly unfold to reveal genuine vulnerability, as in ‘Pieces of Me,’ in which Mason navigates the enormity of love in all its forms with a few simple piano chords. For the most part, however, Mason opts for a more maximalist approach, stuffing as many sonic influences into songs as he can and collaborating with a range of artists, including Javid Bashir, gospel singers Jayando Cole, Keshia Smith and Connie McCall, and Adrian Blake and Kaviraj Singh.
“With this record, I wanted to celebrate all the things that immigration has bought to this country,” Mason says, “whether it’s a singer from Pakistan [‘No More’] or a gospel choir from Brixton [‘Brixton Fish Fry’]. If you think about it, the country as a whole is one giant collaboration. People coming from Bangladesh or Jamaica or Africa: they come here with all their stuff, they meet us, we’ve got all our stuff, we listen to what they’ve bought, they listen to what we’re doing, and you get stuff like The Specials.”
The Specials, this is not. Ska wore its politics like a badge of honour, whereas "Brothers & Sisters" is much more interrogative, holding everyone to account no matter which side of the divide they fall on. While it’s undoubtedly less anarchical than 2013’s mind-bending concept album "Monkey Minds in The Devil’s Key", Mason’s latest album packs a much greater punch, primarily because of the clarity of Mason’s songwriting, which blends psychedelia, hip-hop, ambient, electronica, gospel, and ska without undermining his overall vision.
"Brothers & Sisters" is a challenging, provocative and immensely gratifying album. Most of all, it shines through as a confident artist giving it their all; that alone makes this melee emotive.



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