Yeah, it’s got posthumous vocals from Kirsty MacColl, post-retirement ones from Sinéad O’Connor, and a Malawian rap artist jamming with a British soul singer on a track remixed by Rupert Christie.
Aside from all that, it’s got some damn good traditional music.
Sharon Shannon’s seventh album confirms everything we already knew about her. It confirms that she’s a friendly, easygoing sort of person who’s as like as not to give a whirl to any suggestion put to her, no matter how off the wall. And it confirms that she’s a fine player who takes great joy in making music with equally talented old friends and colleagues.
A couple of the tracks from this album are going to be released as singles and played on the radio ad nauseam, but I’d rather tell you about the ones that aren’t. Shannon’s original tune ‘Hogs And Heifers’, for example – a gentle little jig played on the fiddle, with her sister Mary Shannon chiming in on banjo and Jim Murray’s guitar the only accompaniment. Or ‘Chi Mi’n Geamradh’, the sweet wistful air that opens the set ‘Duncan’s’, similarly stripped-down in its arrangement. Or ‘Space Party’, a set of three lovely new tunes: the first composed by Murray, the second by Sharon, the third by Mary. Or a great set of Tommy Peoples compositions brought together under the title ‘The Wishing Well’.
Or light-voiced Pauline Scanlon’s cover of John Spillane’s ‘All The Ways You Wander’, with Shannon’s accordion taking a back seat – as it also does on ‘An Phailistín’, a song in Irish and Egyptian about the troubled Palestinian people, co-written by Treasa Ní Cheannabháin and Donal Lunny, with pleasantly reedy vocals from Róisín Elsafty.
But news is news, so it’s incumbent on me to mention that Sinéad O’Connor applies her customarily overwrought treatment to that old tearjerker ‘Anachie Gordon’ and to, of all things, ‘The Seven Rejoices Of Mary’; that the Grace Jones hit ‘Libertango’ is reprised here with vocals recorded by Kirsty MacColl back in 1996, augmented by bass and fiddle tracks laid down this year by ex-Waterboys Trevor Hutchinson and Steve Wickham; and that all kinds of people have messed about with Peter Browne’s ‘The Whitestrand Sling’ in aid of garnering publicity and airplay. No doubt their efforts will be successful. Do go ahead and buy the album anyway.