专辑简介

Irish troubadour Shane Sweeney doesn't so much reinvent the folk genre on this lush, impossibly mature debut album as push its boundaries in several compelling musical directions at once--all the more remarkable considering the album was largely self-produced and home-recorded. His songs revolve around familiar, bittersweet concerns of life, love, and their attendant frustrations, but delivered with conspiratorial intimacy on melodic wings (like on the graceful "My Life Better") that Sweeney seems almost embarrassed to share. If there's anything like a template here, it's "Tick Tock," the song that first attracted the interest of most Irish radio stations. His plaintive vocal, embroidered by the mournful solo violin of Pascal Roggen, is suddenly brightened by an instrumental flourish of ambient guitar school noises--before just as quickly wafting on the breeze. With touches that range from "Day in the Life"-styled string collages to the dizzy, exhilarating neo-operatic excesses of long player "Fight," Sweeney's musical palate here is as adventurous as his songs are grounded in emotional intimacy