Liam Weldon: Dark Horse on the Wind (Mulligan)
I salute this reissue of the 1976 album from this powerful, singer/song-writer, who died in 1995; a Liberties man who learnt his music from the travellers who camped in his granny's back yard. He pays tribute to them in The Blue Tar Road, excoriates national hypocrisy in his great raw title song, and thinks deep in his sad, hurting ode to his young son in Jinny Joe. Produced by Micheal O Domhnaill and Donal Lunny, the man mostly sings out alone, but for the bodhran tattoo-lifting Smuggling the Tin, the melodeon under James Connolly, or strings from the two lads behind the cautionary Wild Croppy Tailor. Let's hope his estate makes a few bob out of this passionate little masterpiece.
Mic Moroney
Finola O Siochru: Searc Mo Chleibh/Love of my Heart (Independent)
Reared in Dublin, this Kerry-based lady spent many summers as a kid in Corca Dhuibhne, and it shows in the sweet, floaty style you'd expect of a Begley, and indeed there are songs here learned from Eibhlin. Breandan joins in with box, alongside Maire Breatnach's fiddles and Steve Cooney's intimate, echo-chamber production. The songs are big love songs of sorrow sore: Blasket songs about drownings, or Cait Bhain agus i Marbh, wedded to its original air; and what history behind the ditty of the priest who eloped and joined the Protestant church to protect himself? There's extraordinary fluting polish to the voice, the upper registers keen as a scalpel of feeling so pure and dark, that's it's best taken in small, concentrated doses.
Mic Moroney
Cormac Breatnach: A Musical Journey (Peer Music/Independent)
This jazz-tinged urban tradster makes extraordinarily uplifting dance music on splay-fingered low-F and even low-D whistles, and this gentle solo album sees him joined by Maire Breatnach, fiddler Kevin Glackin, accordionist Karen Tweed, flautist Brian Dunning, Niall O Callanain's choppy bouzouki, and Steve Cooney's intricate wonder-workings with Spanish guitar, djembes, chimes and shruti boxes. From the chuckle of nicely chosen double-jigs, slow reels and hornpipes, through the restless elaborations of his own quasi-baroque composition, A Perpignan; to a nicely spooked-up version of that strange old Blasket air, Port na bPucai (recorded in Cooney's old studio on the Dingle peninsula), Breatnach even delivers himself of a swoony Castilian sex-bragging song with the Cafe Orchestra, topping off a good-humoured, thoughtful collection.
Mic Moroney