Telegraph

The lovely artwork for Kevin Doherty’s third album makes a statement by featuring a photo of the songwriter with a guitar and a typewriter. The notion that song-writing is comparable to writing, when you look at most opportunistic stream-of-consciousness tunesmiths, is pretty laughable, but Doherty is a writer. He’s remembered that, in the past, folk and country music was a vehicle for old memories and new ideas rendered prettily into words. So, amid the guitar picking, sturdy backing harmonies, piano pounding, double bass-plucking and to-be-expected tales of times past (like his great tale of the emigrating Irish on ‘Tugboat’) he drops in refreshing lyrical gems all about economic times present (“There’s panic on the planes of mammon,” he asserts on ‘Mammon’). All in all, it’s well above average and very close to great.