Triniti are three fetching young things from Dublin, who have pop-diva looks and precise, assembly-line harmonies. Their debut is essentially an album of covers, with Ross and Jamie Cullum brought in to handle production. The Cullums have worked effectively with Irish talent before: Ross was co-producer of Enya’s hugely successful breakthrough album Watermark and they worked together on Moya Brennan’s Two Horizons. The chemistry here, however, is less productive – in part at least because of the inexperience of the Triniti girls, Laura, Sharon and Eve.
On the plus side, there are lots of Celtic mists a-swirling about, plus the requisite synth washes, haunting fiddles, cellos and flutes, but all of that has to be rooted in something deeper to add up to more than nice atmospherics. If you’re going to record familiar songs, you need to bring something new to them, particularly in terms of the reading of the lyrics, and their emotional impact. It’s a challenge that Emm Gryner met effectively on her album of Irish covers, Songs Of Love And Death, with radically different treatments of The Corrs’ ‘Breathless’ and Horslips’ ‘Dearg Doom’ among the stand-outs. In contrast, Triniti’s takes on ‘Scarborough Fair’, Sting’s ‘Fields Of Gold’ and Seal’s ‘Kiss From A Rose’ bring little new to the party apart from fresh-sounding harmonies. It’s all very sweet, with only Iarla O Lionaird’s contribution to Clannad’s ‘In A Lifetime’ adding a bit of grit.
Triniti have oodles of vocal talent, and if radio gets behind them, especially in the UK, that might be enough to carry them through – in the way that it did both Boyzone and Westlife. But if their ambition is to produce work that is taken seriously as original and creative, they need to dig a little deeper and put more of themselves and their personalities into the music.