Rating: 5/5
Review:
A very good album
I have always liked Aoife O'Donvan's work, but I felt that
her first solo album, Fossils, had just a bit too much smooth corporate gloss
over it to really speak to me. Here, she
speaks from the heart, her songwriting and performing is natural and
unadulterated and she has a superb band.
It makes for a very good album, I think.
This album is a sort of elegy for her Irish grandfather who
died aged 93 as O'Donovan was conceiving the album, and is also an exploration
of her Irish roots and ties. It has a
thoughtful, elegiac atmosphere and much of it is very lovely. There is often quite a striking contrast
between O'Donovan's slightly breathy, aetherial delivery and the emotional
punch in her music and lyrics, and that is very effective here – I find the
whole thing both beautiful and affecting.
Partly this is because of the wonderful collaborators she
has assembled here. Both the brilliant
Chris Thile and the entirely wonderful Sarah Jarosz are in the band, and the
rest of the musicians are just as good.
It's virtuosic, musically intelligent stuff and this time the production
is pitch-perfect, I think, so the whole thing sounds as though every note means
something.
In The Magic Hour has both beauty and depth to it. I like it a lot and I can warmly recommend
this album.
(I can also strongly recommend Sarah Jarosz's album Build Me
Up From Bones, which is a firm favourite of mine.)
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