I must admit that I was excited by the prospect of hearing Panic Room’s debut album Visionary Position. Sure, I had read some great reviews but the cause of my anticipation lay far deeper than that. The way I figured, any album by a band that is made up of members from Karnataka, Mostly Autumn, and Fish’s band has to be an enticing combination indeed. What I found was a beautifully presented, visually stunning album with excellent artwork and high quality production that set the scene perfectly for the delights contained within.
Panic Room are in fact singer Anne-Marie Helder, guitarist Paul Davies, keyboard player Jonathan Edwards, bass player Alun Vaughan, and drummer Gavin John Griffiths. Each one brings their own talents and inspiration into the project and combine here to produce an elegant album brimming with breathtaking beauty and hypnotic sensuality. The band also invited violinist Liz Prendergast and guitarists Peter Charlton and Gary Phillips to add their skills to the mix. Liz, part of the Welsh ‘Celtic folk/metal’ band Bluehorses, brings an important, highly effective and individual element to the overall sound of the album with her distinctive and dramatic electric violin. The elements were now all in place for the creation of what would become Visionary Position.
It is clear that a huge amount of care, cohesion, precision and craft has gone into every note, every lyric and every sound contained in the album’s eight tracks. The result is a wonderfully complex and atmospheric album that grasps your attention and mesmerizes throughout.
The multi-talented Jonathan Edwards, the man not only be responsible for the highly impressive swirling keyboards but also for the programming wizardry and for the design and lay out of the CD booklet, described the project as a ‘labour of love’. When I asked him what had inspired the name Panic Room he revealed, "It's not really inspired by the movie except in a passing way. I guess the thinking was that following the break-up of our previous band, Karnataka, it felt like the new band was a safe place to escape to - a panic room. But in the end it was just one of a number of names that we were thinking of – Panic Room just felt right to us'.
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