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).
Edged with inflections from New York, where he’s lived for the last 20 years, O’Leary’s vocals are more boy-next-door, but his bouzouki, guitar and piano playing are sumptuous. They reach full late 1960s folk-rock vibes on The Dark-Eyed Sailor and The Bonny Green Tree; closing track Liffeyside has backing vocals from folk-adjacent American royalty – Will Oldham and Anaïs Mitchell – alongside 80-year-old Irish singer Cathal McConnell. These many stitches of sound could feel excessive, but they never smother these songs, instead adding extra dimensions of magical colour and texture.
Also out this month
Andrew Tuttle and Michael Chapman’s Another Tide, Another Fish (Basin Rock) is a project full of curiosity and sweet spirit, seeing Australian banjo player Tuttle taking the leftover recordings of the British folk club veteran as starting points or functional elements of new improvisations and more formal compositions. They drift and pulse gorgeously between hazy Americana, strutting blues and mesmerising minimalism. Morag Brown and Lewis Powell-Reid’s Auld Springs New (Bandcamp) mixes fiddles, accordions, guitars and the cittern (a pear-shaped, Renaissance stringed instrument) in a set of pacy traditional tunes that travels from the Scottish borders to the Balkans. For a more full-throttle Middle-Eastern experience, Yemen Blues’ new album, Only Love Remains (Kartel), harnesses the rhythmic convulsions and energetic melodies of Bedouin folk, then gives them extra swagger.
