This venture is the brainchild of former punk folk-poet Patrick Fitzgerald (then Patrik) also famed for his efforts with Kitchens Of Distinction, and written and recorded in deepest, darkest Connemara.

‘Lullaby For A Broken Dog’ sets the scene with its arcane lyrics set against an unsettlingly bleak guitar-driven soundscape, like My Bloody Valentine but with less gore. ‘Venus Slipped’ has hauntingly evocative backward guitars with harmonies delicate enough to write home about. The lengthy ‘Hamlet Was A Prince’ makes equally portentous and insidious easy listening, with a chorus harking back to the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. ‘Feed Me On The Banks Of The River Nile Afterlife’ is a poorman’s ‘Bad’-era U2, with a more convincing beat than the rest of the songs and superb Stipe-like vocals.

Starkly intimate, Fitzgerald’s lyrics are always slightly left-of-centre and often obscurely eerie, especially when embedded in musical scenarios that alone would evoke barren wastelands and dark nights of the soul. If you want to dance maybe ‘I Know Who Is Sick’ could shift you up to second gear, but it barely breaks the serious and sombre mood of the rest of the material. Lullaby, more a mini-album than a fully grown-up LP, is not overly high on the feel-good factor, but it draws you in on repeated plays and if you listen up hard you can just about imagine the smile on Fitzgerald’s face. It’s not so much the work of a young punk, more a portrait of the artist as a more mature man.