... Phil Shöenfelt together with Bruno Adams (voc., gr., bass) and Chris Hughes (dr., percussions) released an album together, also in last year. If Blue Highway is more influenced by The Doors, in this one you can find connections to Nick Cave and maybe to other aussie groups like The Crime And The City Solution... Once again the songs have strong and dark, dramatic feelings. This is music from untamed nature, blues from the swamplands. The album is full of wild rhythms; the galloping rhythm of Robert Johnson's Preachin' Blues or the powerful drums Phil's City Of Dreams ... The album is built quite a lot upon the covers. You can find there songs from people like Bob Dylan (I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine), Jacques Brel (My Death), Townes Van Zandt (The Snake Song) et cetera. Could you ask for more?
MIND WARP, Katriina Etholén


The Fatal Shore fronted by the team of Brit Phil Shöenfelt and Berliner Bruno Adams, and backed by Chris Hughes, invoke the kinds of visions and tortured guitar rock made famous by Nick Cave, but shows a richness more in line with the Crime and the City Solutions and Rowland S. Howards they so obviously share a kinship with. They call their sound 'noir' in an Edgar Allen Poe meets Jim Thompson American Gothic take on contemporary urban blight and decay. The light distortion and clangy metallic tones weave themselves around lyrical themes of pathological lovers and their obsessive and destructive natures, OD victims, junkies and the like, bursting forth with just the right measure of release. Leaving you the listener holding the bag, or baggie so to speak, of emotional displacement. Phil has played with many of the aforementioned influences over the years a list which also includes the legendary Fall, as well as an airing on John Peel's BBC radio showcase of the freshest sounds in today's music. If you miss seeing powerful and haunting live music in Prague, check them out.
THINK, Keith Kirchner, 01.05.1997