AOIFE MCCANN has been tipping around the edges of the music industry for several years with a special kind of alternative pop featuring artful asides that touch on choreography, theatre, and performance.
Under the performance name of Ae Mak, the County Louth native finally releases her debut album, Folk Songs for Mama & Papa (Spacer Records), and wouldn’t you know it, but the wait has been worth it.
The album is less enigmatic than some of her previous material, as the completely unironic album title might suggest. Recorded between a farmhouse in Ravensdale Forest area and her family’s home in the Cooley Mountains, there is a solid blend of clever parlour room songs (Last Night You Cried to Bach), sharp pop (We Came from the Stars), piano-based ballads, and a gorgeous finger-picking version of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.
Seamus O’Muineachain's latest album is now availableFolk songs with smarts and a deep undercurrent of vulnerability and questions? Absolutely, and not just for parents.
Speaking of which, Bangkok-based, Irish multi-instrumentalist Seamus O’Muineachain started writing his ninth studio album, Island of Flowers (Ghost Home Recordings), after seeing his first child on an ultrasound scanner for the first time.
The results are in, and it’s clear that O’Muineachain has fashioned a batch of vivid instrumentals (forged out of piano, synthesisers, strings, feather-soft percussion, and field recordings) that sonically fuse facets of his current whereabouts with classic aspects of ambient music and electronica.
It’s a gentle and reflective piece of work, ideal for gazing into the distance or upon the face of a sleeping child.
Is there a more individualistic Irish songwriter than Wallis Bird?
The Wexford woman has been based in Berlin for almost 15 years and has a back catalogue of albums that crackle with inspirational songs, all of which are imbued with honesty, courage, vulnerability, and spark.
I Can See Your House from Here (Bród Records) is a highly emotional album focusing on personal grief and global conflict, and the various stages of not only coming to terms with it but also embracing the kind of hope and optimism that can deflect one looking into a deep, dark hole.
The song titles tell their own story (I’m Your Witness, Call the Healer, Grieving Is the Price You Pay, and Why Is Peace Problematic?), while the execution of them veers from soft and gentle to the kind of boisterousness that Bird excels at.
Never say never and never say die would seem to be the dual mantra of The Sentimental Tourists, whose debut album, Without Love We Expire (Self-Released), won’t be popping up on Spotify any time soon (it is available to buy for a pittance on their Bandcamp page).
There is a garlanded Irish rock music history lesson here, as this superb album is a collaboration between Dave Long and Paul Page. Now gentlemen of a certain age (as we say of anyone over the age of 55), Long was a member of Into Paradise, and Page a member of Whipping Boy.
In their respective heyday, each band was highly praised, justifiably so, for song structures, sonic dynamics, and a powerful jagged edginess.
Now, older and wiser and certainly less entangled in music industry machinations, the songs here roll off the shoulder, so expertly implemented you’ll never hear or see the joins.
Songs such as Living in Smoke Dreams, When the Moment Comes, Witches Lane, and Jupiter is Descending emit not just levels of skill (as you would expect) but also the cumulative life experience of musicians who have been through the wringer perhaps more than once.
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