Seeing Lisa O’Neill live and listening to her music in isolation are two very different experiences. The passion and the poetry are present in both, without a doubt, but hearing her songs without the beaming smile or the banter could give the impression that the Cavan songstress is a little lacking in humour. Not so: O’Neill has a wonderfully wry line in self-deprecation that adds layers of levity to her performances. Even without allowing the chinks of light in, however, this spine-tingling third album should confirm O’Neill’s status as one of the country’s finest songwriters.
There are demons aplenty in these dark songs of desperation, death and despair, as O’Neill confronts her neuroses head-on. Some of her devils are internal, some are of her own creation, while others are foisted upon her – yet she stares them all down bravely, even when the result might not be the easiest to face, admitting, “I get the divil in me around you” (‘To Know About The Divil’). ‘Nasty’ is a slow and sultry dance, where the singer knows the object of her affections isn’t good for her, but she’s simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by him, while ‘Gormleith’s Grieving’ is written from the point of view of the wife of legendary king Brian Boru. ‘Planets’ is stunning, with our heroine examining “Questions screaming from my gut to the sky/ Oh why do the likes of you and I see darkness?/ We’re all the same, we’re all presented with sunshine sometimes.”
The music throughout is deceptively simple, O’Neill’s acoustic guitar augmented by drums, banjo, bass, piano and fiddle, courtesy of Mossy Nolan, Emma Smith, Joseph Doyle and Seamus Fogarty, who create a spellbinding fugue that swirls around the stormy lyrics. The musicianship, allied with former Frames guitarist David Odlum’s wonderfully dextrous production, ensures that the main instrument here is O’Neill’s unique voice. And what a strange, beguiling sound it makes, one which can admittedly divide listeners like musical marmite. However, you cannot deny its power nor its primal purity.
The bewitching simplicity of ‘Red Geansaí’ is the club-footed offspring of jazz and sean nós, which manages to be a thing of rare beauty indeed – listen on headphones and allow the song to bear you aloft on wispy threads. The piano and vocals of ‘Seven Sisters’ is the closest O’Neill has come to conventional – and yet, even here, the beauty of her words can carry you somewhere special, while the haunting title track’s simple guitar and vocal arrangement belies the weight of the lyrics, which contemplate mortality. The album ends with the more traditional folk of ‘The Banjo Spell’ and the epic lilt of ‘The Hunt’.
It won’t be to everyone’s tastes, certainly – O’Neill’s often seething voice is too abrasive for that – but for those who commit to the experience, there’s a terrible beauty hovering inside these almost unbearably honest songs.