Album Review: Barry McCormack, The Tilt of the Universe

Barry McCormack’s Dublin isn’t the city of well-heeled IT professionals, global financial dealings and four euro frappuccinos. The city he inhabits is one of early houses, barflies and broken hearts.

A folkie at heart, the former Jubilee Allstar isn’t afraid to experiment with more modern musical tools. ‘All The Things You’ve Done’ is built on an electronic bass buzz and Gary Fitzpatrick’s brilliant banjo, before McCormack’s bruised and battered baritone barrels in with a parable of “the ungodly and the shook.” The singer uses a very talented cast of musicians, including Bill Blackmore, who adds some gorgeously understated trumpet to Michael Murphy’s stately bass, Mary Barnecutt’s beautiful cello and the searing guitar of co-producer Stephen Shannon.

McCormack’s songs are always memorable, whether he’s hiding from political door-steppers (‘Cash For Gold’), dreaming about the great fire of 1875 which saw whiskey flowing through The Liberties (‘Take The Blows’) or greeting the fornicators, sodomites and born-again buskers at the ‘Gates Of Hell’, a folk-punk wig-out where Shane McGowan meets Sid Vicious in a Georgian tenement. There’s a touch of Dylan to his phrasing, and even Bob would be proud of McCormack’s assertion that “life is what happens when you’re busy cracking open cans” (‘A Little Knowledge’).

Sometimes his delivery is over-dramatic, describing slurping an ice cream on Greystones promenade or the aftermath of the Liffey Swim as if he were advertising a Hollywood blockbuster, but that’s a minor quibble. A gutter poet with a keen eye for detail, McCormack’s descriptions are usually on the money, whether he’s describing the “ritual chasing of the skirts” of Friday night Dublin (‘A Long Way Away’), the curtain twitching “legion of the appalled” (‘The Back Of The Pipes’) or the legendary lock-ins in certain hostelries where “pints were being poured for the chosen few.”

Unfashionable and lived-in, these are beautifully dog-eared ballads of the disaffected.

Out: October 21, 2016