Home Run

It is, of course, exceedingly easy to ridicule the Flowers. Hardly Irish modernists they've often come across as dream-dazed in their Celtic haze, a band whose emotions have outstripped their creative sense and whose neo-hippie leanings actually owe less to Timothy Leary, San Francisco et al than to the juvenilia of the early Yeats before he most belatedly lost both his virginity and feyness at 29.

But "Home" should leave their fans happy and ensure a few new converts. It may not be a conclusive masterpiece but it definitely shows the Flowers developing with a new technical assurance and generally eradicating the faults that bedevilled their their debut on tracks like the clumsy "Feet on the Ground". Moreover, once they reach the second side, the Flowers also successfully extend their range as they wisely move away from the original Celtic soul inspirations that motivated them.

Still "Home" begins with familiar fare. You could argue that the initial Flowers' had two songs, the slow one and the whirlwind piano-driven stomper and the opening cut "Hardstone City" is literally breathless as Liam O'Maonlai's paino hurtles headlong for the tape, whilst his vocals also markedly and nakedly show the influence of that lost seventies leader Tim Buckley.

Indeed there are initial moments when "Home" actually seems like a solo O'Maonlai album with his piano foremost in the mix. Nonetheless it isn't 'till the side reaches the closing cut, the Daniel Lanois-produced "Shut Up And Listen", that we get a real bolt of the blues.

Compare that track with the earlier ballad, "Sweet Marie." The latter is intense, a Big Statement, but it's almost as if O'Maonlai's emotionality actually derails the song and the arrangement, rather like a mountaineer who's got trapped on a ledge short of the summit and can't go either back or forward.

But Lanois isn't interested in O'Maonlai as another Irish performer contesting the emotional Olympics. Instead he draws a more conversational, intimate vocal from the singer that suits rather than scuttles the song. And with Lanois' own atmospheric dobro also colouring the piece we finally hear a band who don't automatically emotionally overreach.

Similarly inventive are tracks like "Movies", "Eyes Wide Open" and "Water" on the second side. The former is clipped by Noel Eccles' percussion and all three tracks show the Flowers comfortably expending their rhythm range and breaking out of old patterns.

"Eyes Wide Open" gives Fiachna O'Braonain the spotlight for some flikering acoustic guitar while "Water" must be the album's most fascinating track, the first Irish-Islamic song steered along by guests Philip Pyke on didgeridoo and Nawalith Ali Khan on fiddle, alongside the band's own chanted harmonies. If all the rest of "Home" had failed, both "Water" and "Shut Up And Listen" would certify the Flowers' future.

Some faults remain. Lyrical wit is still lacking - you wouldn't employ them as copywriters - and the one cover, "I Can See Clearly Now", exemplifies the shortcomings of their Big Vision as they barrel off again into one of those passionately sprinting instrumental passages that are probably intended as a facsimile of the gospel experience - in this instance the effect is merely to fracture the delicacy and sweetness in Johnny Nash's original.

But, produced by Paul Barrett, the title track "Home" is a ballad that does work and when O'Maonlai signs off with a traditional cameo, "Seoladh na nGamhna" we definitely have returned to first base with profit. This album may not be perfect but this long time sceptic is at last prepared to accept that the Flowers might yet become the class act their champions have long claimed.