CD Review: Any Moment – Concept Album

ANY MOMENT – Concept Album – Various Artists (Streaming)

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩ 

From the pen of a wonderful young Australian talented composer, Bradley McCaw, comes a new concept album Any Moment. It’s not a completed work but it is the nucleus for something that could (and probably will) become a very interesting stage production.

Set over the course of 24 hours, the work begins at Midnight on New Year’s Eve, and moves throughout a single town, hearing stories from various individuals as the clock tumbles toward midnight and a new year. Inspired by the famous John Lennon quote “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans” and hit musicals like Closer Than Ever and Songs For a New World, Any Moment explores what a minute in time truly represents and questions what commonality binds a community together.

The tracks start at midnight with the sounds of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ playing and we meet four strangers: a young man running away from home to start a new life; a woman at a party not having the best time of her life; a weary truck driver trying to stay awake as he’s heading home to his family; and a mother with her crying child. We then head through the day and at certain intervals hear from an assortment of characters either working, reminiscing, playing, protesting, etc. The actual concept of the album is very thought-provoking – we do sometimes just see life through our own trivialities, but as I am sitting here typing this review, it is quite mind-boggling to think just what is happening to other people at this precise moment in the community in which I live.

Tracks include: ‘Twenty More Til’; ‘My Phone’; ‘Before the Story’; ‘Next Time’; ‘Doin’ It for the Kids’; ‘She Walks In’; ‘Rovers Song’; ‘Rock and a Hard Place’; ‘The World Goes On’; ‘A Church On Murphy Street’ and ‘Hard To Keep a Good Girl Down’. The artists on the album are: Shaun Kohlman, Lizzie Moore, James Shaw, Irena Lysiuk, Judy Hainsworth, Stephie De Silva, Lauren McKenna, Jonathan Hickey, Liz Buchanan, Kathryn McIntyre, Emily Vascatto and Kurt Phelan. All music and lyrics are by Bradley McCaw – a name we are definitely going to be hearing more of throughout the years.

If I had any reservations it is that the majority of the songs are downbeat and about the unhappy side of life. I know New Year is a time when a lot of people are at their lowest, but also it is a time when people also look forward with great optimism and perhaps that should be scattered among the more thoughtful times covered on the album. However, I am aware this is basically the beginning of the project and I am sure that someone with the talent of McCaw will come shining through.

Nick Wakeham