CHRISTY HITS the chill-out zone? It’s enough to put the heart across club culturalists and hardcore troubadours alike. Moore’s often bedecked his songs with gaudy tapestries, but on Traveller, in partnership with Leo Pearson, he’s cross-pollinating folk forms with deep space beats, head music and ambient swashes, sticking his neck out further than ever before.

But does it constitute a return to form?

Well, let’s pause a moment and consider the title. To what is he referring – his own balladeer background, or the fact that he’s flaunting formats, a spirit flitting between material worlds? Both perhaps, but ‘The Siren’s Voice’ offers other clues. While the music does come close to being new age wallpaper, the lyric restates the hard fact that the apartheid once levelled at travellers is now being implemented against refugees and asylum seekers. Here, Christy’s vocal ruthlessly parodies Paddy racists (“No niggers or knackers or wogs no refugees/ . . . Mile Failte my arse sez she/Living off our land/Living off our hard earned surplus”). Was he consulted when Clare McKeon interrogated Aine Ni Chonaill on the telly?

Backtrack to the opening ‘Urgency Culture’. Withering soundbites denounce the very societal whirl the music evokes (“Hotbed of nothing/Holocaust of silence/Violence of apathy”), while the singer’s town-crying seanchai routine recalls William Burroughs parodying Roosevelt’s radio homilies in the wicked indictment of America, ‘A Thanksgiving Prayer’.

And later, Moore advocates free-thinking and anti-materialism on ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy O’ (“Yerra what do I care for me house and me land?”), a tune he first tackled over two decades ago, but which is transformed here by buckets of delay and a gobsmacked backing track constructed from Bristolian bass pulses, Donal Lunny’s bazouki and Liam O’ Flynn’s banshee pipes – in other words, Planxty on Mars.

It’s not the only instance in which the singer samples his own heritage: ‘Rocky Road To Dublin’ and ‘The Well’ boast git-up-the-yard vocals hitched to gauche but sprightly 6/8-time bodhran (or “bowrawn” as he spells it on the sleeve, out of concession to Yank phonetics or divilment, I’m not sure) and Dr. Rhythm figures, and on the latter tune, embroidery from The Edge. Jiggery-pokery indeed. Another flashback: ‘One Last Cold Kiss’ – the best track off his 1978 collection The Iron Behind The Velvet – is also revived and reanimated with synthetic breadth and a sympathetic vocal.

Some months ago, this writer tabled the notion that Van Morrison might do well to try something as outlandish as framing his Islamic/sean-nos leanings against the kind of landscapes Eno or Orbit might concoct. I was being fanciful of course, but here, on ‘I Loved Her’ and ‘Tell It To Me’, Christy’s not far off the same mark, putting new skin on an old ceremony, contrasting that ancient phrasing with fresh (for him) textures.

There are a couple of ill-judged moments. Chuck Murphy’s anti-Inquisition tune ‘Burning Times’ doesn’t draw quite enough blood, and the arrangements sometimes twitch uncomfortably, as if about to play the Cartoon Celtic card. But for the most part on Traveller, Christy’s found nourishment in the new, and an abundance of relevant targets for his wicked tongue.