A gorgeous, delicate debut folk LP by the Dublin-based singer-songwriter from County Meath with an exquisite voice, not unlike that of Joni Mitchell, that hovers and rises with expressive control, with themes of memory, grief, desire, and self-reckoning. The album was written in the aftermath of the pandemic, when Ellie O’Neill was forced to return to her family home on a County Meath council estate. It fuelled many emotions, a difficult period of personal change, coming to terms with her queer identity, fitting or not fitting in, and slow social evolution of Ireland itself. Every song, mostly accompanied with acoustic guitar, are tenderly performed and poetically written, with highlights including Anna With the Silver Arrow: “My heart was granite and molasses … I found you at a time of fallow / Moving like the swarm ascending / High up, bodies, backs all bending”), the quietly sung piano of Half Immune (“I’m half immune to your white moon skin / Half immune to your black calf eyes/ Half immune, and half sunk in”), the intricate and melodious Little Sister, and perhaps most striking, the fantastic, delicately finger-picked Bohemia, with intermittent whipcracking thunderclaps and lyrically vivid lines such as: “Carving dancers, high and mighty / Look how the old is new / Shifting forms, the greenest deity / Cailleach and Clothrú.” Exquisite work all the way through from opener Silent Water to closer Seabird. Out on St. Itch.
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