Like other individual, poetic voices – Tom Waits, Björk, Leonard Cohen, none of whom she remotely resembles – that of Lisa O’Neill will always divide opinion. Steeped in the cadence of her native County Cavan, it is by turns raw and wild, warm and melodic, grief-stricken and exuberant, driven always by the drama inherent in the song. On her previous album, 2018’s much-praised I Heard a Long Gone Song, O’Neill was occupied principally by numbers from Irish tradition, though it was an original, Blackbird, that appeared on the Peaky Blinders soundtrack.
Here, she unfurls a sequence of eight originals bound together by a cascade of imagery drawn largely from nature, in particular the bird kingdom, “a lawless league of lonesome beauty” the singer yearns to join. The record opens with words from Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 poem The Great Hunger – “Clay is the word and clay is the flesh” – that establish its themes of mortality and nature. On Old Note, O’Neill’s meditations are strikingly set against a drone arrangement by fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire, one of many gifted players on board, and elsewhere comes tragic pre-Raphaelite romance, the starry realms of “moon’s milk and sun’s silk”, and to close, a lullaby. Transcendent and original – a triumph.
