Professor Yaffle is an essential Liverpool psychedelic folk collective, mapping their territory with a record rooted in place and memory. For fans of: CSNY, Tim Buckley, Talk Talk, The Byrds, Sufjan Stevens, and Love. Like Tame Impala doing Nick Drake covers.
The album revolves around Everton Brow - an unremarkable Liverpool hill offering the city's finest view. Lead singer Lee Roger returns to this vantage point throughout eight tracks, using it as both a setting and a metaphor for looking back on life without nostalgia. From Everton Brow, you can see the Mersey stretch toward Snowdonia, with the city spread below like a living map.
The track "Lost in a Dream (On Everton Brow)" weaves Roger’s lyrics as an eighteen-year-old with newly composed music, while "Everyone Wants to Dream" confronts the disorientation when your children grow and your role shifts. "On Top of the World" becomes what Rogers calls "a stoned love letter to Liverpool".
This is Professor Yaffle's first release with Violette Records, marking the beginning of a partnership between two Liverpool entities who've circled each other for years before finding their moment. The album cover features a 1979 Karl Hughes photograph of a policeman surveying Liverpool from Everton Brow, capturing something essential about the record: that those who maintain order might dream the biggest dreams of all.
"Songs that speak clearly about things that are difficult to articulate - the changing nature of purpose, the ways we dream our fears away, the view from unremarkable hills." Because sometimes you need to be above it all to see what's been right in front of you.
