The Sky And The Ground

If nothing else, The Sky And The Ground is a measure of the shortest possible distance between New York and Wexford. Within that space Pierce Turner has taken some gaudily sentimental 19th century Irish airs, minced them through the clenched teeth of New Wave rock, sealed them in a lyrical pressure cooker and allowed them to simmer on a back-boiler of Afro rhythms. And what does it sound like?

Well, lemme see: It's exactly what you would expect to hear if Talking Heads had covered a selection of Moore's melodies in C.B.G.B.'s circa Remain In Light with David Byrne, Christy Moore and a Lebanese mountain singer sharing the lead vocals!

As with his last album, the brilliant It's Only A Long Way Across, Turner doesn't just tack various styles together, instead allowing them to flow into each other to form a kind of fluent musical Esperanto. He rejoices in his use of words in much the same way as a sculptor rejoices in stone, wringing the last note from every syllable. Thus lines like "Broken arms in casts and cuts on legs and arms/slobbering over a cup of tea" (among many others) are meant to be sung not just looked at. And when he sings them they fly off like tracer bullets in all sorts of directionless parabola but always converge to hit their intended target.

Usually, gently. For all the passionate emotions on display here, there is little snarling and no shouting. The LP was recorded in a converted church in New York and has a very dignified ecclesiastical feeling running through it what with Turner's own soulful keyboard playing (which is featured strongly) and the stained-glass window effect of the arrangement. However, all of this is brilliantly usurped by the pagan rhythms and the babbling-brook-of-consciousness songwriting. These internal tensions are best exemplified on the majestic 'You Can Never Know' which is, literally, a head-on collision between 'Walk On The Wild Side' and 'Faith Of Our Fathers' (yep, the hymn). This song also goes a long way towards explaining the Turner muse. A muse that can be as inspired by a Gregorian chant as a Public Enemy rap.

Of course, all of the above wouldn't matter a damn to most people if it wasn't delivered in an easily accessible structure and thankfully it is: Producers Simon Boswell as Turner himself, have clothed most of the tracks in a bright commercial plumage ('Surface In Heaven', 'Have You Looked At The Sun Lately' and the little track are particularly airplay friendly) and one song, 'His Reason', even has a rousing keyboard riff that a lot of pop-metal bands would kill for.

There's probably more of Ireland in this record than any LP that's been made here in the last ten years. What other songwriter, for example, would attempt to rhyme "Dia Is Mhuire Dhlabh" with "the Queen out on a drive" ('Mayhem') or even mention something like "the children's allowance", for that matter?

Joyce with a voice, Yeats on skates or Brendan Behan with an electric guitar, Pierce Turner is a great artist and this could well be his masterpiece.