The Greek island of Hydra is not the subject of this luscious, balmy album of traditional songs, but the location of their recording in an 18th-century carpet factory overlooking the Aegean sea. To mention it in the album title could be canny marketing for lovers of louche idols Leonard Cohen and Henry Miller, who both found inspiration there, but its prominence also suits this LP’s drowsy warmth, given the extra light brought to these stories of the sea, love, work, war and migration.
Dundalk-born flautist, whistler and singer Nuala Kennedy adds rousing rainbows of colour to these arrangements. Her heraldic flute introduction to I Will Hang My Harp on a Willow Tree (a ballad of a heartbroken soldier, learned from Newfoundland singer Anita Best) is bracingly beautiful, as are her urgent reels at the end of the ghostly Willie-O. Her striking, high singing voice also pivots between friskiness and mellow maturity. It’s eerily innocent on Irish ballad Ag Bruach Dhún Réimhe (a song written to a song thrush by 18th-century poet Art Mac Cumhaigh, while he sheltered in castle ruins) and gorgeous in duet with O’Leary on the desperately sad but subtly sexy The Night Visiting Song (where a woman lets in her begging lover, wet to the skin).
