Maria Doyle Kennedy

Maria Doyle Kennedy

Sing

‘I’ve found my voice.’

As statements of intent go, it’s a bold one. The line can be found in Maria Doyle Kennedy’s ‘The Silence’, from her third album of original songs, written and recorded with long-term partner-in-crime Kieran Kennedy.

Entitled Sing, it’s a richly imagined record, one that marries folk forms with torch-song melodies and draws on flamenco rhythms, avant-rock, Celtic, Mediterranean and Appalachian airs. There are misty mountain songs like ‘Sing From the Sea’, with its serpentine twelve-string figures and dusky soul vocals. There’s the spellbound ‘Hola Luna’, a Celtic fable in the form of a perfect pop tune. Then the harmony-laden Dusty country-soul of ‘The Most Beautiful People Are Broken’, the woozy, swoony ‘12 White Horses’, the Nilsson-ish cool hand on the brow that is ‘Am I Choosing Right’.

Over the span of ten meticulously crafted songs, Sing casts ethereal spells, oblivious to worldly babble. No matter how distinguished the guests, they all become transformed in some fashion: Damien Rice changes from a dark balladeer to a man transfixed by sirens. Paul Brady is recast as a Strabane-Andalusian banshee, barely recognizable as himself. And the great John Prine duets on the lovely ‘Yes We Will’, assuring the listener that the two people in this song will go on, because they must.

Sing is a subtle but powerful record, one that deals in the currencies of joy and doubt, magic and grief. These are wise, measured and sometimes tender airs, sung by a woman at the peak of her creative powers, arranged, produced and played by a man at the height of his. These songs, we’ll wager, will soundtrack baptisms, revels, weddings and wakes. They might bury us yet.

Peter Murphy.