Maria Doyle Kennedy
Maria is just home from Los Angeles where she performed songs from the Jan 27th Worldwide Itunes released album THE STORMS ARE ON THE OCEAN and songs from the forthcoming album SING
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Maria + Kieran: The Storms Are On the Ocean
For Release: January 27th 2011 on Mermaid Records
The Storms Are On The Ocean available worldwide on iTunes and www.mariadk.com
Maria Doyle Kennedy's last album proper Mutter was a collection of ghost songs, avant folk
songs, eerie fairytales and cinematic snapshots of bedraggled actresses walking barefoot on
Mulholland Drive. It was also one of the most bewitching records of 2007.
The Storms Are On the Ocean might well have been named GrandMutter. A collection of
Appalachian standards dressed in beautifully darned gowns, its spiritual siblings are Plant's
Band of Joy, PJ's White Chalk and Gillian Welch's stark daguerreotypes. Here are courtly
tunes, murder ballads, child ballads and death fugues all beautifully backlit by Kieran Kennedy's
acoustic guitar, banjo and piano. These apocryphal airs often recall Dylan's definition of
folksong: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles,
plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. All these songs about roses growing out
of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels, about skulls
and flowers and death and curses and nine times this and ten times that.”
Each song deals from the bottom of the deck, every line is freighted with its opposite
meaning. Under pretty petticoats, the lover's vow 'Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow' wears
garter-strapped to its thigh the loaded threat of suicide. 'O Molly Dear' is haunted by death
premonitions that might be self fulfilling prophesies. There are lullabies that double as infanticide
ballads ('Sleep Baby Sleep'), songs as simple and profound as Blake ('The Wandering Boy'),
and wry riddles like 'The Mountaineer's Courtship', which contains half the information required
to re-DNA Bonnie 'Prince' Billie after the bomb.
Always the listener is reminded that these mountain holler hymns were written as Irish and
Scots morality tales, Elizabethan verse and Presbyterian psalmistry before the Puritans brought
them to Plymouth Rock. The Joan of Arc acapella 'Standing On the Promises of God' smells
of Salem witch trials, while 'To the Work' is a Shaker paean to the dignity of transcendence
through holy toil. Here's your soundtrack to Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip or Miller's The
Crucible. A beauty.
Peter Murphy (Hot Press Ireland) Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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