"Wayne Mason's album is full of hits waiting to be heard"

 The land has always been a looming presence in the songs of Wayne Mason. Just think of "Nature" the hit he wrote nearly 40 years ago for his teenage band The Fourmyula, enshrined in the "Nature's Best" series as this country's most loved anthem, with its images of trees and fallen leaves.

That sense of location remains in this latest collection. These new songs have skies and seas, foothills and endless roads. But it is the figures who inhabit this land that most concern the songwriter.

And on "Sense Got Out" Mason's figures are starkly drawn. Like people in shock, they appear to have forgotten their names. They walk dazed through these songs, stripped to their cores, identified only by the emotions they are left with.

The first song finds a couple Mason calls Dreams and Hopes having their last dance together. It is a portent of things to come, as we are introduced in the subsequent songs to Lonlieness, Fear, Guilt, Despair and Sainity, all struggling to find their way thorugh, or out of, this world. Then there is Sense - named in the album's title - who got out when he has a premonition of the wreck ahead.

These are tough, bleak scenes depicting break-ups and crack-ups. Yet Mason's instinct for hooks has never been more finely tuned.  His voice is so comfortably melodic it feels as though Dreams and Hopes might get another chance after all.

In a kinder, gentler world, these great songs would be all over radio. "Art House Movies"  or the cryptically titled "Einstein" are hits waiting to be heard.  "Shutters" is a shuffling rocker of the kind Mason hasn't delivered since he was in Rockinghorse in the 70's while "Last Dance", "Centreline" and the exquisite title track offers choruses that deserve to become as much part of our cultural landscape as that iconic sylvan snapshot he gave us all those years ago.