CHRISTY MOORE: “King Puck” (Columbia)

MOORE THE elder’s back, wiser (and just a tad sadder) than last time, with a slewful of songs he’s been threatening to put on vinyl for a long time, but never got around to, until now.

He’s incorrigible as ever, brain waves fingering synapses never before located, lateral thinking turned perpendicular – at an angle with the world and all the better for that.

But so much of King Puck is old hat. For the most part, it’s a collection of songs we’ve heard so often we know them inside out and upside down. Songs we’ve heard in tents and theatres and music halls, that stretch the cerebral cortex to its very limit when they travel in real time, in real space. Trouble is, stripped of that elusive live chemistry, they deflate and dampen; stripped down to the bone in the studio, they shiver with the cold.

Look at it one way and you think: oh, for such gems on many another acoustic album in the last 12 months. ‘The Rose And Me’ is his ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, all 13.20 minutes of it, laden with all manner of obtuse and acute angles on everything from Tashkent to Tridentine masses, Garda clubs to gay bikers – and the incomparable co-pilot on a kango hammer. This is the stuff of your dippiest dreams. But somehow, even dippy dreams pale in the cold light of day.

As a writer, Christy’s learnt from the best and from the road. ‘The Two Conneeleys’ is a pitch-perfect ode to a pair of fishermen who drowned, a beauteous piece of grief and regret. ‘Giuseppe’ is an understated telling of a terrifying scéal that’s lost nothing in impact from the retelling and ‘Sodom And Begorra’ is as good as its title promises it to be.

So why the reservations? Well . . . for one, it’s the muted feel that pervades the album. With a title of King Puck, the least one would expect would be the odd whoop or holler to rattle the neighbours and keep folk safe from the folkies. Instead what we get is a whispered secret aimed at our own ears only.

For another, the spartan arrangements strip the songs bare in a way that seems almost cruel. Jimmy Faulkner’s guitar and Máire Breathnach’s fiddle and viola attempt to clothe the king, but are too soon whipped from the wardrobe before they’ve had a decent chance to impact on the body temperature.

The key to the entire affair must be the retreaded ‘Before The Deluge’, a resigned and jaded distant relative of its earlier incarnation when Christy was a Moving Heart. It shuffles. It sighs. And I weep for better days.

King Puck will visit many a tape deck before the year is out – and rightly so. Everybody needs a break – climb a mountain, jump in a lake, or shoot up on a dose of Moore. It’s what adds the zest to life. Maybe Christy could do with a pick-me-up of his own. After all, he can’t minister to us all of the time without an elixir of his own.

Even King Puck gets pampered before he assumes his crown. How does a week in Killorglin sound, Christy?

• Siobhán Long