Maria + Kieran: The Storms Are On the Ocean|For Release: January 27th 2011 on Mermaid Records
The Storms Are On The Ocean available worldwide on iTunes and www.mariadk.com
Maria Doyle Kennedy’s last album proper Mutter was a collection of ghost songs, avant folk|songs, eerie fairytales and cinematic snapshots of bedraggled actresses walking barefoot on|Mulholland Drive. It was also one of the most bewitching records of 2007.|The Storms Are On the Ocean might well have been named GrandMutter. A collection of|Appalachian standards dressed in beautifully darned gowns, its spiritual siblings are Plant’s|Band of Joy, PJ’s White Chalk and Gillian Welch’s stark daguerreotypes. Here are courtly|tunes, murder ballads, child ballads and death fugues all beautifully backlit by Kieran Kennedy’s|acoustic guitar, banjo and piano. These apocryphal airs often recall Dylan’s definition of|folksong: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles,|plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. All these songs about roses growing out|of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels, about skulls|and flowers and death and curses and nine times this and ten times that.”|Each song deals from the bottom of the deck, every line is freighted with its opposite|meaning. Under pretty petticoats, the lover’s vow ‘Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow’ wears|garter-strapped to its thigh the loaded threat of suicide. ‘O Molly Dear’ is haunted by death|premonitions that might be self fulfilling prophesies. There are lullabies that double as infanticide|ballads (‘Sleep Baby Sleep’), songs as simple and profound as Blake (‘The Wandering Boy’),|and wry riddles like ‘The Mountaineer’s Courtship’, which contains half the information required|to re-DNA Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie after the bomb.|Always the listener is reminded that these mountain holler hymns were written as Irish and|Scots morality tales, Elizabethan verse and Presbyterian psalmistry before the Puritans brought|them to Plymouth Rock. The Joan of Arc acapella ‘Standing On the Promises of God’ smells|of Salem witch trials, while ‘To the Work’ is a Shaker paean to the dignity of transcendence|through holy toil. Here’s your soundtrack to Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip or Miller’s The|Crucible. A beauty.
Peter Murphy (Hot Press Ireland) |
