Released last month, and produced by Paul Weller, this gorgeous set of songs by the Irish folk singer-songwriter’s seventh album paints vivid pictures with superb musicianship and stories of personal narrative and protest. With a consummate guitar technique and a strong, moving singing voice, the images are even literal with opener In Painter’s Light from the perspective of a frustrated artist; delicious views of Galway and melancholy with recollections of motorcycling grandad in The Stars Over Kinvara; and the tragically moving tale of the courageous Syrian refugee-turned-Olympian Yusra Mardini who crosses the Aegean from her bombed homeland in a boat where many others drown. There’s the local drug dealer whose life is going nowhere in Andy Sells Coke, and even a dysfunctional father-son relationship between Greek gods in the dialogue between Zeus and Apollo. And two particular protest songs tinged with heavy irony - Have You Not Heard The War Is Over, which points to an old man still thinking WW2 continues (though there of course many more wars continuing), to the voice ghost of Luke Kelly on Convict Ways. Both powerful and moving, most of the album sees O’Rourke’s nimble guitar fingers at play, though on the melancholy title track, he sings along to piano with a dash of violin in a song that echoes some of the style of Joni Mitchell. A thing of beauty from start to finish. Out EastWest Records.
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