Ann Scott, the dark lady of Dublin sonnets, signs her name, stamps her seal and dispatches the footman with a third album that within moments of its spectral opening tune, ‘Love Is In Him’, flashes the listener back to the spell cast by Kristin Hersh’s ‘Your Ghost’ or PJ’s White Chalk. Fragmented word pictures flutter and light upon simply picked guitar figures. Spirits hang in the air like wisps of perfume.
Recorded in Dublin with Karl Odlum (a man who, it seems, never sees sunlight) and in Audio Electrical in Chicago with Frames guitarist Rob Bochnik, the record features an all-star line up of acoustic mafiosi (Kim Porcelli, Gemma Hayes, Dave Hingerty, Colm O’Snodaigh, Joe Chester, Katell Keineg, Colm Mac Con Iomaire and many others), who tiptoe on and off the set like folks paying respects at a funeral. Not that the record’s ever mordant, although it is solemn. If anything, it’s the quiet child at the party who would rather be at home drawing pictures than being told to mix with the other children like someone, y’know, healthy.
So, a song like ‘Killerman’ is part murder ballad, part shoegazing lament, and unflinching as an autopsy, ‘Return To Die’ an English folk corpse dressed in a starched white dress, ‘Universe’ a small truth placed under a big starry sky. ‘Candy’ is Hal Willner’s weirdest nightmare. ‘Flo’ drifts down the river on an amphibious piano. The atmosphere is all autoharp and homicide, with visuals courtesy of Charles Van Schaick circa 1890.
So come on home, pull the drapes, uncork the bottle, smell the spells. Here be phantoms. They’ll get you drunk.