Album Review: Rosie Carney, Bare

As a much-touted, much-streamed, and much-loved artist, Rosie Carney is one of the most powerful voices in Irish music. For confirmation, look no further than her debut album, Bare.

Sparse though it is – there’s rarely more than an acoustic guitar and piano at work in these songs –warmth and intimacy are ever-present throughout this album. In the opening track, ‘What You’ve Been Looking For’, you can literally hear every intake of Rosie’s breath between the lines; it makes you follow the movement of her voice and hang on like she’s whispering conspiratorially in your ear.

This intimacy works so well for the artist that she makes singing about her hard-won battles seem easy. In ‘Bare’, an album highlight, her voice works through tones of disillusionment, confusion and resilience all in a matter of minutes. In ‘Awake Me’, a song which the singer revealed is about the “strangle-hold of depression”, she manages to distil her experiences of this illness into something which is introspective but revelatory, dark but with an ultimate catharsis.

Elsewhere in the album, her duet with Lisa Hannigan on ‘Thousand’ finds Rosie’s unique voice amplified by another one of Ireland’s best singers, while ‘Humans’ feels folksy in a Joni Mitchell kind of way, but with its emotional impact being real and striking.

But perhaps the most beguiling thing about this music is Rosie’s surprising ways of making her lines lyrical, affecting, and carrying thoughts to their meaningful conclusion, without necessarily having to make them rhyme. Take the haiku-esque lines in ‘Zoey’: “The sky is auburn red/I placed my heart within the worlds/That we have made”. Or the way the ‘you’ hangs just after the last bar in the closing lines of ‘Bare': “Stronger the beat, of your/Heart grows along, as you/Build up your home, you can/Breathe on your own.” It’s simply beautiful and poetic, like the album as a whole.

We’ll be hearing a lot about Rosie Carney in the years to come.

9/10

Out now.