Villagers, the Divine Comedy, Josh Ritter... There’s something in the ether that has caused Irish or honorary-Irish songwriters to disregard the boundaries of the solo acoustic or four-square band set-up, rewrite history without the Beatles and the Stones, and start thinking cinematic.
Like her former collaborator Conor J O’Brien, Cathy Davey opens her new album with a widescreen epic. ‘The Nameless’ is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious tunes you’ll hear all year, an Elizabethan/Appalachian ghost ballad bedecked with bells, drum taps, twangy guitars and choral section that rescues PJ’s White Chalk urchin from Michel Faber’s gutter and dresses her as a madame in a supernatural spaghetti western. Big and mythic and Morricone-esque, it might yet soundtrack Kill Bill III.
She doesn’t leave it there. Davey’s songs seem to derive from at least three different timezones, a transglobal curiosity not far removed from Kate Bush’s trailblazing early albums. ‘Army Of Tears’ pits vocal melodrama against stabbing strings and a three-tiered backdrop of harmonies, while ‘In He Comes’ delicately places a geisha vocal over deftly played neo-Victoriana.
And yes, we do hear a single. ‘Little Red’ echoes Talking Heads in the same way ‘Reuben’ tipped a wink to Elvis’s ‘Marie’s the Name’. Like the aforementioned Villagers record, there’s something very 1950s-according-to-Lynch-and-Badalamenti going on here. ‘Dog’ is a Shirelles melody hitched to a ramshackle alt-rock shuffle, ‘Bad Weather’ a quietly show-stopping torch tune somewhere between Mary Margaret and Peggy Lee, and ‘The Touch’ drapes a slinky vocal across an ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ baby grand.
And she doesn’t let up for the last act: The Nameless concludes with a lovely (and lovelorn) three-song dream-pop suite – ‘Lay Your Hand’, ‘Universe Tipping’ and ‘End of the End’ – that’s nothing short of exquisite.
With 2007’s Tales of Silversleeve, Cathy Davey found her voice. Now she’s found her sound, a sort of quasi-classical sci-fi folk-pop underpinned by a bit of burlesque bump and grind, flavoured with a coy (as opposed to arch) theatricality. Praise be for little wonders.