After all the awards that Heard a Long Gone Song has retracted – and at the latest the attention that her fabulous interpretation of All the Tired Horses in the context of Peaky Blinders stirred up – gets All of This Is Chance received more attention in advance than Lisa O’Neill’s previous releases.
Nevertheless, the Irish critics’ favorite will probably remain a niche sensation, the songs go by All of This Is Chance but felt the way further in a more open, more avant-garde and less tangible direction. Where the breeding ground now seems to be geared towards a somewhat more personal point of view and less traditional storytelling, the anachronistic, culturally influenced folk of O’Neill now grows into dystopian soundscapes: mysterious and mystical, timeless and poetic, unstructured in a Celtic equivalent aesthetic between 16 Horsepower, A Silver Mount Zion or Warren Ellis wandering.
Behind the unconventional voice of the 41-year-old, the instruments proliferate in a naturalistic, almost brutalistic way, often only as uneasiness flickering far away on the horizon in the textures, and clothing an untamed wildness in warm, engaging melodies. Mourning and melancholy are often the driving force, but never despair the expression in picturesque, idiosyncratic as well as quirky worlds.
The title track grows darkly like a gloomy accordion thicket of a drone arrangement by fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire (The Frames) to the poetry of The Great Hunger. A rusty acoustic guitar strums across the almost post-apocalyptic homely underground. O’Neill tells and recites more than she sings on her stalk, but towards the middle the ambitious opener airs, the voice approaches the familiar, childishly shrill curiosity and gradually moves into the melodies with more swing, leaving the theatrical Lecture coming to the melodramatic surf seems friendlier – than if Crippled Black Phoenix and Efrim Manuel Menuck came up with a song for Natalie Pratt.
Basically, the action becomes more inviting. Silver Seed then adds a cello and banjo and seems immediately more accessible in the solitude that fills the space behind the events like a deep cave, while the singing only outwardly shows a carefree solemnity: “Colleen, be careful when wishing/ Because love is not a decision“.
Die ambient area of Old Note is almost meditative, cultivates a dreamy piano over the so peacefully flickering sound cosmos, which, at the latest via the concluding sample by Sadie-Mae, O’Neill’s niece, welcomes in a wonderfully comforting way to the heart of the record: at this point the event has long since started not only more dense, but also secretly better and better.
Therefore acts in Birdy From Another Realm the restrainedly conjured drama of drones, David Coulter’s singing saw, guitars and vocals, made more passionate, cinematographic and intense by a piano and its pleading drama, also by no means disturbing but inviting, distilling the thematic motif of the birds before The Globe calmly breathing, peacefully undulating, even summoning up a subtle chorus, and in its own way simply ethereal and beautifully enchanting. If I Was a Painter there is a devotional folk longing, whose ghostly harmonies celebrate a fairytale-like departure into solemnity. Whisht, the Wild Workings of the Mind as the longest number, decelerated, wearily seeks the principle of hope, swells and nestles softly, lets a chorus wander through the mental cinema as if Nick Cave were roaming through the imaginative Highlands, meanwhile Goodnight World with Ruth O’Mahoney’s piano and disembodied brass nuances as a ballad from an eternal, universal memory. Although like All Of This Is Chance so in total just in relation to False Lankum only partially overwhelming in the neck, but even without outstanding flashes of genius erupting upwards, it is clear what a timeless grower O’Neill has created there.
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