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With Paradise Razed, Blyth Power, that ever uncategorizable band produced their last truely great album. In the last ten years they have done some good work, released work that other bands would be proud of, but by the high standards set by their early work, this album marks a departure.

Firstly what are Blyth Power all about. Many songwriters claim to be poets setting their words to music, well Joseph Porter, the drummer/ frontman/songwriter of the band truely is. This is intelligent poetry set to rock music. Armed with a knowledge of Classics, History, Political and Social study and a large helping of wit and word play, we have a modern day mix of Byron, Auden and Rupert Brooke spread over original rock music infused with a flavour of music from times past.

The songs have a leaning towards a folk tradition, in that they are basically stories. Although they are basically fictional tales they carry messages wrapped up in them which are pertinant even today. The imagary is an amusing mix of old and new, such as the opening track Bacchus On The Wagon, a tale of what happened when the god of wine and revellry is ordered to give up drinking,

"And what of all those pretty acolytes
that Bacchus now disowns,
who naked through the summer leas
beside him used to roam
they`ve left the Elysian Fields behind
and bought a Barratts home"

This song is a typical example of the make up of the album. Clever lyrics, yet delivered without any hint of pretention, guitar driven, often punky beats and good use of harmonies. The standout track on the album is the epic Signalman White, with a flurry of vocal harmonies, punk guitars and crashing piano fall into line and provide the power behind a night time ghost story in the railway cuttings and signal boxes of the back end of middle England. A change of pace ends the song in a melodic rant, rythmn guitars and drums hammering home the point.

A complete change of style is offered up next with the piano lead, renaissance like Rowans Riding, a tale of dark spite and revenge of a serving girl over a presumtuous knight. This song seems to reflect the range of dynamics that the band have at their disposal. The past influences of the punk years still echo through some of the album, this is after all a band that can trace their family tree back to Crass, the great unwashed collective who virtually invented the "crusty" scene.

Carlisle takes those punk sensibilites adds a dash of melody and then races off into the distance, bass lines spiral around, guitars

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