Goldtooth Cinnamon

Twenty-seven year old Clive Barnes is most definitely not your average Irish singer-songwriter. This bluesman might hail from Enniscorthy but he sounds like he would be more at home sitting on the porch of some ramshackle shack in the Mississpi blues delta, trading moonshine and tales of heartache.

His fourth album is an intriguing offering. Musically he draws on country, a smattering of folk and of course the aforementioned blues to provide the backdrop to his deep, very American sounding voice.

The images he conjures up seem a million miles away from Celtic Tiger Ireland, the storytelling lyrics provoking images of dreamers drunk on whiskey, wandering through fields with the wind at their backs and yearning for girls in cotton dresses. Yep, it sounds dreadfully old fashioned but somehow, for the most part, it works.

When it does it gives us songs like the title track and ‘St. Cloud’, as well as album centre piece ‘Bloodshot Soul’, which display a brilliant songwriting touch and sound amazingly mature even for a twenty-seven year old. When it doesn’t work it results in songs called ‘Red Eyed Jim’ and ‘Kitty Twist’, which sound distinctly less convincing but thankfully manage not to break the overall mood of the album.

Throughout Barnes’s deep, rich and reflective voice is backed up and life breathed into the songs by some fantastic violin and mandolin work from Paul Kelly, while Barnes himself proves to be fingerpickin’ good with an acoustic while also throwing out some mean slide guitar blues when the mood takes him.

The credits don’t actually say whether Clive ever spent a J1 summer in Mississippi to fuel his passion for such music, but if he continues at this rate questions about dodgy deals with the devil might have to be asked down at the local crossroads.