This Irish singer-songwriter may ply his trade as a folkie – meaning his shows are him with guitar and banjo – but on record he becomes an electronic shape-shifter, layering songs in beats, loops, hisses, clunks, wheezes, found sounds and bites of conversation. His storylines, delivered with rueful hindsight, are similarly surprising. Carlow Town relates a night crashed out in a church, awakening to a mass. Van Gogh’s Ear captures a disturbed mind amid the hurly burly of London’s underground, and the title track’s reminiscences of his County Mayo youth come enhanced by wistful violin from Emma Smith. By turns gritty and poetic, its words “scattered like teeth”, it’s also a real original.
