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…………………………….
.Maria + Kieran: The Storms Are On the OceanFor Release: January 27th 2011 on Mermaid RecordsThe Storms Are On The Ocean available worldwide on iTunes and www.mariadk.comMaria Doyle Kennedy's last album proper Mutter was a collection of ghost songs, avant folksongs, eerie fairytales and cinematic snapshots of bedraggled actresses walking barefoot onMulholland 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 ofAppalachian standards dressed in beautifully darned gowns, its spiritual siblings are Plant'sBand of Joy, PJ's White Chalk and Gillian Welch's stark daguerreotypes.
Here are courtlytunes, murder ballads, child ballads and death fugues all beautifully backlit by Kieran Kennedy'sacoustic guitar, banjo and piano. These apocryphal airs often recall Dylan's definition offolksong: “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 outof people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels, about skullsand 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 oppositemeaning. Under pretty petticoats, the lover's vow 'Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow' wearsgarter-strapped to its thigh the loaded threat of suicide.
'O Molly Dear' is haunted by deathpremonitions that might be self fulfilling prophesies. There are lullabies that double as infanticideballads ('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 requiredto re-DNA Bonnie 'Prince' Billie after the bomb.
Always the listener is reminded that these mountain holler hymns were written as Irish andScots morality tales, Elizabethan verse and Presbyterian psalmistry before the Puritans broughtthem to Plymouth Rock.
The Joan of Arc acapella 'Standing On the Promises of God' smellsof Salem witch trials, while 'To the Work' is a Shaker paean to the dignity of transcendencethrough holy toil. Here's your soundtrack to Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip or Miller's TheCrucible.
A beauty.Peter Murphy (Hot Press Ireland)
