(2021) Damien McGeehan - Kin  

Review:
Four years after the startling experiment in looping and overdubbing of his solo debut, The Tin Fiddle, Donegal fiddler Damien McGeehan’s follow-up is an altogether different proposition. Jam-packed with guests, excitedly layered with accents drawn from jazz, rockabilly and Senegalese kora music, Kin can’t be faulted for trying to push the envelope of Irish traditional music and for pushing the boat out with an often bristlingly busy sense of ensemble, even if McGeehan occasionally gets lost within what results. Lead-off taster single, ‘Runnin’ on Bourbon’, is a volatile, brass-fuelled tribute to New Orleans jazz threaded around McGeehan’s dancing fiddle while ‘Moonlighting’ nods towards the free-flowing fantasy of Stéphane Grappelli against a percussively animated backdrop. There’s an agreeable collision between laid-back reggae and funk snap to ‘Dúlamán Na Binne Búidhe’ and ‘The Girl & the Lass’ sparkles with music-box sweetness. But it’s the pared-back offerings – the jaunty ‘Errity’s Jigs’ and relaxed reverie of ‘Paddy’s Tune’ – along with a trio of characterfully delivered songs by McGeehan’s wife, Shauna Mullin, that catch the attention here with simplicity and directness as their watchwords. If it all feels caught between competing ideas that never quite cohere, there’s still no faulting McGeehan’s often lightly worn but always engaging musicianship.

Track List:
01 - An Chéad Chathlán
02 - Dúlamán Na Binne Búidhe
03 - Strange Affair
04 - Runnin' On Bourbon
05 - Siún
06 - James Monroe
07 - The Girl & the Lass
08 - Moonlighting
09 - Errity's Jigs
10 - The Briar & the Rose
11 - Paddy's Tune


Media Report:
Genre: celtic, folk
Country: Ireland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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