SOUL SURMISE

RYAN VAIL - FOR EVERY SILENCE

Derry’s Ryan Vail first came to my attention with his collaboration with Ciaran Lavery. That EP Sea Legs featured in my best of 2015. Vail brought his experimental electronica to Aghagallon’s finest songwriting craft. It intrigued.

Then on a recent The Art Show on BBC NI, Vail was intriguing me again. He was playing an old piano on a barge crawling up the River Foyle. It seemed that this particular piano had made this very same journey 90 years ago, when it was acquired by Vail’s wife’s Grandfather.

The story caught my attention, as did the reconstruction of its first journey. I then discovered that Vail’s first full album release is all about that piano. 

Now, regular Soul Surmise readers know that I am not big on electronica or experimental instrumental music. It is usually the lyrics that give me traction. There are words some on For Every Silence but Vail as a rule uses his music to create what he wants to say.

For Every Silence is a beautiful piece. I love it when Vail plays that old piano. The sound is deep and tender, loving and respectful. It washes gently like the surface of the Foyle on a calm autumnal evening. It is gently restorative to the soul.

The ageing sounds of that piano sit alongside the youthful ambience of electronica. It is seamlessly done. 

Elsewhere the songs are haunting. Vail’s voice is hushed and husky and particularly effective on Faces and Mirrors. Best Boy Grip known here as Eoin O’Callaghan makes Above The Whitewash holy and cathedral like. 

No more artistic or tasteful piece of audio art will be released this year. I would love to hear the entire piece on the back of a barge on the Foyle.

THE 4 OF US - SUGAR ISLAND

In the middle of March 1993, I spot Brendan Murphy from the The 4 of Us on a plane from Dublin to London. I watch him like a hawk a few rows in front, timed my leaving the plane to perfection, and congratulated him that She Hits Me had just charted, the day before, at #35 in the UK charts. My fan nerdishness kicked in and, after I told him which extra tracks on the CD single I liked, he asked if I could help him with the Underground. That night Janice and I were Guest List at the Subterranean.

In the early 90s The 4 of Us were Ireland’s biggest thing. Yip, they were the first band to beat U know 2 to the top of the Hot Press Readers poll for Best Irish band. The Subterranean was the second time I’d seen them in London and they were the most energetic sweat inducing rock gig experience of the time. 

Almost 25 years later and The 4 of Us are a very different proposition. Sweat drenched gigs have given way to the subtlest art of songwriting. Not of course that those early songs like Mary and She Hits Me were not crafted.

Sugar Island has actually got no electric guitars or cymbals. It is like an unplugged template onto which the melodies and arrangements do all the work. Declan Murphy’s inventive and at times sparkling guitar playing and Brendan’s voice are well enough to hold you across the twelves songs.

Even more interesting is that much of Sugar Island is written around the Murphy brothers’ upbringing in the 70s in Newry, Co Down. Newry is right on the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and these boys had no ordinary childhood and teenage years as the Irish Troubles raged all around them. 

As with the understated nature of the record’s construction the songs don’t over dramatise such a dramatic backdrop. These are songs of love and play and family holidays. Yet, the extraordinary context of that ordinary life brings intrigue. Bird’s Eye View, Going South and Hometown On the Border tell it well.

Just as interesting is the title track. Sugar Island is at the centre of Newry and the song is a story of teenage love and heartache. It has a tune to die for. Had they released this in 1993 it could have been a massive hit. 

Hell To Pay is another that caught my attention. Seemingly about someone on death row it is not autobiographical but perhaps some of the boys’ Christian Brothers School upbringing sneaks in as it seems spoken to a priest. Sadly there seems no hope of redemption. The preacher in me was wanting to shout about grace and forgiveness! 

 

Sugar Island was a wonderful find. It had sneaked out without my knowing. It is yet another example of Irish songwriters excelling. Per head of this island’s population we write way above our weight!

OVER THE RHINE - BLOOD ORANGES IN THE SNOW

 

The genius of Over The Rhine’s Christmas records is not just that they put the emotions and stories of the rest of the year into the Christmas story, it is that they also put the Christmas story into the rest of the year. This is why I can with integrity listen to their Christmas records, particularly Snow Angels and this new one Blood Oranges In The Snow, in November. Actually you could listen to these songs in July and not feel it out of sync. 

Blood Oranges In The Snow come in their usual organic and rustic Americana beauty, laying a musical foundation for Karin Berquist’s angelic voice through which they deliver poetry pretty much unequalled among their peers. That poetry is permeated with depth of human experience. 

These particular songs are suffused with a melancholy that peels back the sentimentality of Christmas that even Christmas carols have yielded to the temptation of. In these songs people lose parents, are struggling with drink and homelessness. There is a world at war in the very place the Christ child was born to bring peace. These are songs that expose the sadness and weariness of a world on the brink of hopelessness.

Yet, there is hope being marinated through the whole batch. Grace is a baby in straw; old hymns around the fire; sparkling rumours of redemption at play; faint Christmas bells; confidence and grace; a hope for all mankind; biblical verse in neon above the trash; bright future in a checkered past. 

Right in the middle is Over the Rhine's finest moment; Let It Fall. How many time have I listened to this song as a prayer, as a meditation, as a sermon in the beauty of melody. A song for those who have lost, who are trying too hard. A song that runs us back to the heart of the Advent and the best advice you'll hear this December: 

"‘Cause rain and leaves
And snow and tears and stars
And that’s not all my friend
They all fall with confidence and grace
So let it fall, let it fall"

I love the warm fire, family together, nicely decorated, Santa calling, presents opening, turkey eating Christmas. However, there is so much more. If you lean in and listen you will hear the possibilities of something new. Something earth shattering has hit the world in the image of a soft baby in straw. It is such a deeply resonating thing that it should not be contained to a couple of weeks of the year. It should be sprinkled across the whole year like the sparkling rumours of redemption mentioned on this record. That is what Over The Rhine do. Christmas songs for all year round; for that is what Christmas should be.

The genius of Over The Rhine’s Christmas records is not just that they put the emotions and stories of the rest of the year into the Christmas story, it is that they also put the Christmas story into the rest of the year. This is why I can with integrity listen to their Christmas records, particularly Snow Angels and this new one Blood Oranges In The Snow, in November. Actually you could listen to these songs in July and not feel it out of sync. 

Blood Oranges In The Snow come in their usual organic and rustic Americana beauty, laying a musical foundation for Karin Berquist’s angelic voice through which they deliver poetry pretty much unequalled among their peers. That poetry is permeated with depth of human experience. 

These particular songs are suffused with a melancholy that peels back the sentimentality of Christmas that even Christmas carols have yielded to the temptation of. In these songs people lose parents, are struggling with drink and homelessness. There is a world at war in the very place the Christ child was born to bring peace. These are songs that expose the sadness and weariness of a world on the brink of hopelessness.

Yet, there is hope being marinated through the whole batch. Grace is a baby in straw; old hymns around the fire; sparkling rumours of redemption at play; faint Christmas bells; confidence and grace; a hope for all mankind; biblical verse in neon above the trash; bright future in a checkered past. 

Right in the middle is Over the Rhine's finest moment; Let It Fall. How many time have I listened to this song as a prayer, as a meditation, as a sermon in the beauty of melody. A song for those who have lost, who are trying too hard. A song that runs us back to the heart of the Advent and the best advice you'll hear this December: 

"‘Cause rain and leaves
And snow and tears and stars
And that’s not all my friend
They all fall with confidence and grace
So let it fall, let it fall"

I love the warm fire, family together, nicely decorated, Santa calling, presents opening, turkey eating Christmas. However, there is so much more. If you lean in and listen you will hear the possibilities of something new. Something earth shattering has hit the world in the image of a soft baby in straw. It is such a deeply resonating thing that it should not be contained to a couple of weeks of the year. It should be sprinkled across the whole year like the sparkling rumours of redemption mentioned on this record. That is what Over The Rhine do. Christmas songs for all year round; for that is what Christmas should be.

VAN MORRISON - KEEP ON SINGING - A Review and Reflection on Healing

One of the most fascinating commentaries on the work of Van Morrison has to be from John Paul Lederach. Lederach is a visionary author and practitioner in the fields of conflict transformation and peace building. Not the common or in the garden place to find a chapter on Van Morrison. 

Yet, in his book When Blood and Bones Cry Out; Journeys Through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation that is what we get. Chapter 8 is called Following The Healing Muse and is fascinating in that it comes out of a time when Lederach himself was healing from a serious car accident and over that year he listened to the works of Morrison which he believes helped the process.

Why do I bring that book up in a review of Van’s new album Keep Me Singing? Well, one part of Ledearch’s theory is very much alive in Morrison’s new collection of songs. Maybe Morrison has actually read When Blood and Bones Cry Out because the lines in the title track “I got to go back in my memory bank/See how it ought to be now” is exactly what Lederach is stating.

Lederach has the idea that to heal we might benefit from going back into good memories of the past to help us heal in the now. You can see why he finds an affinity with Morrison. 

Van Morrison has constantly worked a rich seam of his early Belfast memories. We might feel that the transcendent moments of a Hyndford Street childhood, “dreaming in God’ or being “caught one more time up on Cyprus Avenue” were subjects to create songs. Maybe they are more. Maybe Lederach is revealing the power of Morrison’s healing muse.

Keep Me Singing is a record that trawls all of Morrison’s favourite past fishing gorunds. It is a record full of memories. We even have a song called Memory Lane. It is also never far from pain and sorrow. Van steals a line from the old Spiritual “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen/Nobody knows my sorrow” on Holy Guardian Angel. 

Holy Guardian Angel is one of those prayers to the transcendent, so common in Morrison’s 80s and early 90s work. Call me theological squeamish but for me it is a brilliant Morrison moment but it loses some substance by being directed at an angel.

Why I really wanted to bring Lederach’s thoughts to bear on this record is that the entire piece sounds like  Van Morrison is in a very good place of spirit. It is as if the healing has begun. The last two records of new originals Keep it Simple and Born To Sing; No Plan B had good songs, Behind The Ritual on the former, Mystic Of The East on the latter, but there is something free and easy about this new collection. There is less angst. There is still hurt, yes but there is more inner contentment. The music flows. The songs are strong. The feel is buoyant. It is Van Morrison at his best.

There is beauty in the sadness of Everytime I See A River and Out in the Cold Again. There is the aforementioned transcendence on Holy Guardian Angel, on which those recurring themes of the spiritual and Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Hour blend. 

The very best of the collection is In Tiburon which takes Van back to his early 70s time living in San Fransisco and all of us musically back to the Inarticulate Speech Of the Heart with the stacked up images and literary references. This is A star Morrison. Utterly brilliant!

Going Down to Bangor is not as classic as In Tiburon but is particularly exciting for the Northern Irish like me to hear Bangor’s Pickie Pool and the Cavehill sounding as romantic as San Frans North Street Alleys and Geary Street. There is yet again a sense of healing in the remembering.

Morrison’s most consistent work since The Healing Game for sure… and there’s that healing idea again!

DEACON BLUE - BELIEVERS

Three albums in four years! Come on! I don’t believe that Deacon Blue believed that this would happen but Believers is here and this Trilogy of albums (Hipsters, A New House, Believers) seems to not be so an Indian summer of a career as a brand spanking new and relevant contribution to a music world that as a band they walked away from over 20 years ago. 

Believers glides in melodic flight, the harmonies make it soar and Jim Prime’s piano gives the updraft. These are are immediately accessible rock pop songs that bore their inedible beauty through your skull. 

Ricky Ross has always added to his melodies a wonderful light touch of lyrical flair. His images, his rhyme, his look at the world creates three minute sermonettes that can nourish the soul without having to preach.

Perhaps it’s in Gone that we find the core thought of Believers:

 

“Everybody’s lost

Not just the ones you know

We are reluctant travellers

All trying to get home.”

 

Ross has said that the record was written in the shadow of newscast stories of refugees risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean for a better life. The greatest refugee crisis in history could not be ignored. Gone, Birds and the title track are most pointedly about beaches, waves, boats, movement, hopeful new beginnings and tragic endings.

Yet, the lyrics make the travelling inclusive of us all. Ross says, “This album is about the journey we all take into the dark. You come to that point in your life where – whatever you’ve been told, whatever the evidence you’ve been presented with – you just don’t know what the answer is. At which point you can only rely on instincts of your heart. You either take the leap or you don’t.”

So, Deacon Blue drop the weightiest depth charges in the gentlest ways into our journeying souls. 

 

“Oh the toughest test

is not the way we came into this world

Or the way it ends

yes the toughest test

Is what lies between and what we do

With the time we get

 

There’s a hole in the middle

We gotta work out how to fill it in.”

(Meteors)

 

You can’t know everything

You’re such an innocent soul

You can’t learn anything

Unless you let somebody show you

And you’ll not know everything

Even if you started right now

You must trust someone

Cause someday darling trust’s all you know”

(You Can’t Know Everything)

 

With Deacon Blue they can journey into that dark but they always carry light and hope and faith and indomitable love. The Believers believes in a better day: 

 

Step on a boat

Go on a journey

May it take you to heaven

And never bring you back again

So you no longer fear the boatman

Or the swell of the ocean.”

 

Birds believes that “one day we’re going to be free” and:

 

“We’re high above jail walls and windows

We’re high above the waves of worry

We’re floating on the wind

Cause nothing can begin

To make us want to land again.”

 

This Is A Love Song maybe says it best of all:

 

“Love is enough

Love will do

Love last longer than

Anything we’re going through

Love is enough”

 

The lyric sheet is called The Believers Hymn Book. It’s a subtle pointer to the spiritual surmises, questions and insights that this collection of songs contain. There is little question that Ross’s faith is an underwriter here but he’s not proselytising. This is about belief in humanity, in the right choices to side with those whose journey into darkness needs our helping hand. It’s an inspirational piece of rock music to fire imaginations and make wake up calls:

 

“I can no longer watch

I can no longer wait

I can no longer hope

I have come awake.”

(Come Wake)

 

It is likely to bring Deacon Blue their highest chart placing since 1994. Who’d have believed it! I’m a Believer!

BEN GLOVER - THE EMIGRANT

There is a moment on the new Ben Glover’s album where you sense the whole thing fits together. It’s in the final song. In The Green Glens Of Antrim, Glover tweaks the traditional words to sing:

 

“Soon I hope to return to my own sweet Glenarm

It’s the one place for me, it still has its charm”

 

Glover has contemporarized this old traditional tune but has done so for the good of his own migrant soul. It’s a long way from wee sleepy Glenarm on the east coast of Antrim to the musical hub of Nashville Tennessee. I can imagine nights in the summer heat, or journeys on the long lost highways between gigs when Glover’s migrant heart returns home.

I was a little surprised that Glover whose writing credits with the likes of Mary Gauthier and Gretchen Peters have propelled his career has decided to record an album of traditional songs. When I heard it I changed my mind.

Glover has been able to somehow make a record that with four original songs, including co-writes with the aforementioned Gauthier and Peters, slotting in around six old Irish folk songs has made a cohesive work of original and vital power.

Glover’s voice is so deep and rich. It’s in Mike Scott or Glen Hansard territory. It evokes deep emotion. When the production adds pipes to Ralph McTell’s From Clare To Here, it’s heartbreakingly beautiful.  

The original Heart In My Hand, written with Gauthier, links the Irish who took the dangerous emigrant ships down recent centuries and has you on the dangerous boats of today’s Mediterranean. 

 

“Sacred the crossing, sacred the fear 

Heart in my hand, heart in my hand 

Sacred the longing, sacred the tears 

Heart in my hand, heart in my hand 

Sacred the sailor who gives his heart to the sea 

Heart in my hand, Heart in my hand”

 

Like this entire collection it is a song of resilience, a longing for what is up ahead but still yearning for what is left behind. It’s a leaving of home, a returning to home, a searching for home. Throw in the traditional favourites The Parting Glass, The Auld Triangle and The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, that have rarely had a more fitting context of collection or been better performed, and this is the reality of the emigrant more than the romance, the soul traumas of the journey as much as the almost elusive refuge of destination.

As the title track, co-written with Gretchen Peters puts it:

 

“It’s in my bones it's my blood 

This dream of home as it never was 

Where the hills fall upon the coast 

My heart wanders there the most 

The loneliness of the emigrant 

Is like nothing else I've ever felt 

The restlessness, the discontent  

That's the curse of the emigrant.”

 

All in all, Glover has done what all great art should do. He has given us a subjective angle on his own story and in doing so has brought us face to face, or ear to soul, with the heartache of every fleeing refugee in a world where the refugee is the headline story on all our news cast.

Fair play sir!

THE BEATLES - EIGHT DAYS A WEEK Review

What a great little band is how Paul McCartney describes The Beatles. Eight Days A Week more than proves his point. As the popularity grew, the audiences got bigger and the girls screams louder and more shrill it became more difficult to make good music. The PAs were very poor as no one had ever played rock n roll to this size of an audience ever before. There were no onstage monitors.

When Giles Martin remixes the original recordings and we get to hear the band beneath the white noise of teenage screams it is a remarkable record of a great little band. Ringo speaks of watching the bums shaking to work out were they are in the song. As a drummer he comes out of this as a great musician. They all do. Dizzy Miss Lizzy just rocks out.

The madness that it became has never been more accurately catalogued. As the film begins McCartney describes it as having been simple at the start. By the time we get to late 1965 and into 1966 these four guys who start out as the boys next door, as much influenced by The Goons as Elvis, have got caught up in a freak show. Everything around them is mad. By the end you can see in their faces the consternation at the furnace they are being burnt alive in and the frustration that their genius is not being heard. 

In the midst of the madness something else struck me afresh. How did these guys churn out such a catalogue if music in such a short time while doing so much touring. It is, however, one thing to write on the road but to come up with such a machine gun fire of hits… bang bang bang. 

This is the genius. Few writers have been able to knock out hits year on year. That The Beatles did it while touring, filming and making two albums a year. Glory! I mean even after She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand this movie gives you Ticket to Ride, A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love and Help!

The footage is great, the editing engaging both with four young men who were hurled into mania and with the political, social and cultural changes going on around them. I was particularly taken by interviews with Whoopi Goldberg and Black historian Dr Kitty Oliver who suggested that The Beatles he broke some segregation barriers.

The film had me imagining two what ifs. What if they had had the same PAs that we have now. How good would this band have sounded? And secondly, what if they had gone back on the road at the time of Let It Be. The Rooftop concerts from 1969, that end the film, are evidence of them still being a great little band. Oh the music we lost! 

If Ron Howard wants to follow this one with another then what about one on The Beatles’ women? The wives are obliterated from the story like in the First and Second World Wars! When you get to the end and The Beatles cannot take it anymore you wonder how they put up with nearly three years of this and then have to ask how their wives and partners coped. 

It therefore needs to be asked if the fact that Ringo and Harrison had new wives had anything do with their decision to quit the road. Harrison seems the first to scream ENOUGH. He’d just married Patti. Did time at home with her not seem more appealing than another hotel suite? It is part of the story missing here.

All in all, this is a great piece of work. It is a fascinating time in our recent history. This band was the soundtrack and also propelled the changes happening. It is all well captured in Eight Days A Week.

 

ROMANTICA - SHADOWLANDS

There are times when I hear a song and it sums up absolutely the musical sounds that most tickles my soul at that given moment in time. It is so utterly beautiful to my ears that it seems to be part of me. It soothes, it heals, it inspires, it pushes me on to deeper things. It touches my heart in what in ordinary terms might be called a sorbet, a cleansing between that busy hard chapter of life, and what the next vocational challenge is. In spiritual terms it is a sabbath, time to take out of the hand to the plough strain and just rest the soul in God, via a melody and some words. 

Romantica is that sound for me. As soon as I press play on Shadowlands, and Let The Light Go Through You begins, I sink into something like a hot soul bath and my entire being relaxes into refreshment. Ben Kyle’s voice has a sacred connection. With the rest of his Romantica mates on board, there are these sweet harmonies and the gentlest instrumentation. The pedal steel - oh my! It is like heading off into a Minnesota forest and retreat with God.

Of course it helps that Kyle’s lyrics are acutely aware of my need for sorbet and sabbath. The album title Shadowlands is a nod to his fellow Belfast spiritual writer CS Lewis. Kyle shows Lewis-esque spiritual insight and wisdom that makes him like a sage for the 21st Century soul that gets cluttered up with stuff. He never preaches and rarely prophesies about specific events but my goodness few songwriters have the innate ability to convey the struggles of those of us seeking to find God in the madness of culture and religion.

Take Harder to Hear my song of the first half of 2016: -

 

Its getting harder to hear my heart these days

Harder to hear my heart these days

There’s so much culture in the way

 

Oh somebody save me

Somebody save me

I don’t want to be cool

Somebody shine a light

somebody shine a light on this soul tonight

I don’t wanna be right

 

It’s getting harder to hear from God these days

Harder to hear from God

There’s so much religion in the way

So much superstition in the way

 

What a song… and the next song Give Your Heart a Shelter just continues the soul soak…

 

Sometimes the night and the darkness know better

In the heartache is when we find the heart breaks through

 

It is a pastoral gem.

Not all the songs are as spiritually weighty but all shine a light in songs of touring, family, life in St Pauls and childhood in Belfast. The last song gives a smile in the heart for that childhood. A follow up to the utterly wonderful National Side, from their America album, it has him cycling to the sweetie store for bon bons and a Shandy Bass! Remember it well! 

All in all this one is chasing everything else released this year to the top of the Albums of 2016 lists. Ryan Adams meets Head and The Heart. Ben Kyle is a secret gem. Romantica give his songs the fuller or just full enough sound to make that soul soak sweet, sweet, sweet!

PAUL SIMON - STRANGER TO STRANGER

Paul Simon. My goodness Paul Simon! He’s 74 years old for goodness sake. When he was in his mid 20s he came across to England wrote songs like Homeward Bound. Great song. Just a few guitar chords, good, melody and clever lyrics. Fifty years later and none of us would argue if he churned out a few crafted songs in the same ilk.

Not Paul Simon. As his career has gone on he has seemed more and more adventurous. Whether the South African Township sounds that gave us the iconic Graceland record, or the South America rhythms of The Rhythm Of The Saints, or bringing Brian Eno on board as sonic landscaper on Surprise, he has always pushed the envelope of his soundscapes.

And so with his thirteenth solo record, Stranger To Stranger. Paul Simon is at it again, bringing us fresh and vital sounds and rhythms. The flamenco obsession is still there and then he adds the unique microtonal instruments of Harry Partch and then most fascinating of all Italian electronic artist Clap! Clap! 

Once the musical intrigue has grabbed your interest, Simon then layers on rhymes, slights of poetic hand and a comedians humorous timing. Into all of that comes social comment, spiritual questioning and introspective reflection. It is all encompassing, intense and altogether enjoyable.  

Lyrically Simon has me in the very first verse:

 

Milwaukee man led a fairly decent life

Made a fairly decent living, had a fairly decent wife

She killed him. 

…Ah, sushi knife

Now they're shopping for a fairly decent afterlife

 

How brilliant is that!? Yet, there is more than humour going on in The Werewolf. This song is about judgement personal and social. The social lines are as funny but as poignant: -

 

The fact is most obits are mixed reviews

Life is a lottery, a lotta people lose

And the winners, the grinners with money-colored eyes

Eat all the nuggets, then they order extra fries

 

The second track has been the lead off radio play. Wristband is a word and title that shouldn’t work, particularly for a songwriter of Simon’s poetic finesse but it does. Apparently it was Irish poet Paul Muldoon who convinced him to keep it in.

It’s another funny story. Rock Star walks out of the venue and cannot get back in without a wristband. Again the humour gives way to a serious point:

 

The riots started slowly 

With the homeless and the lowly

Then they spread into the heartland 

Towns that never get a wristband

Kids that can't afford the cool brand 

Whose anger is a short-hand

For you'll never get a wristband 

And if you don't have a wristband 

Then you can't get through the door

 

Paul Simon can make you laugh but ultimately there is no small talk on a Paul Simon record. As well as the social comment Simon has been rather obsessed with the spiritual in recent records. So with Stranger To Stranger. Proof Of Love is about a pilgrimage he made to a spiritual healer in Brazil. 

 

I trade my tears

To ask The lord

For proof of love

If only for the consolation

Of gazing at the stars above

 

The final song (before the extra tracks), Insomniac’s Lullaby was the first song written and it again is a bit of a prayer:

 

Oh Lord, don’t keep me up all night

With questions I can’t understand

While I wrestle my fears

The sound in my ears

Is the music that’s sweeping the land

The Insomniacs Lullaby.

 

As Paul Simon hits his mid 70s he is as crucial as ever. His songs are of more soul substance than anything he has ever written. Stranger To Stranger went to Number 1 in the British charts for goodness sake. Heart, soul and mind tingling!

 

CIARAN LAVERY - LET BAD IN

If great music can come out of a remote wee town in Ulster County, New York State at the end of the 60s (I am reading Small Town Talk about Dylan, The Band and Van up in Woodstock) then we shouldn’t be surprised that Agahagallon, a tiny village on the edge of Lough Neagh in Country Antrim in the province of Ulster could be the fertile place for a cycle of amazing songs.

Ciaran Lavery is yet another brilliant songwriter from Northern Ireland. I keep saying that in sheer depth of songwriter talent we are way ahead of what we should be be producing head per head of our small population.

It is more obvious and not journalistically lazy to set Lavery alongside Foy Vance and even, if you go island wide, Glen Hansard. He has their ability with song craft and that rasp of a voice - oh yes.

I guess if you dug through the surface of the songwriting sonic intrigues of Lavery you might find a Ryan Adams as his bottom line template. Yet, he does with his songs far more interesting things than Adams has done for some time. 

Okkervil River is as close as he gets to Adams but then this distorted brass thing kicks in and takes it in Lavery own particular direction. Though a seamless collection of songs there is much variety, delicate piano of Sonoma, the almost unaccompanied Let Bad In, Wilder’s sweet strings, Failing Light’s beats and his voice gives drama and authority on Train.

The whole thing is constructed around growing up. Bless him but at 29 Lavery thinks he has grown up! Yet, he delves a childhood on the shores of Lough Neagh and asks who he was and what he has become from the nurture he has had. My favourite is the guitar driven Tell Them All where he shares his dad’s wisdom in a may You Never or Forever young kind of way:- 

 

“Give a hand while you can give it

Give a life where you can live

If you hang it on the string you’ll watch it fall

Never raise a glass to someone’s sorrow

Never talk about tomorrow

And if the hang man comes to have you on the stall

You tell them all”

 

It’s Aghagallon Proverbs on a record that declares a weight emerging talent.