Lights Of The City

This heartfelt love-poem to the strumpet city, and to those who wander its streets looking for connection, compassion, a home, should be required listening for anyone who has ever been anywhere near Dublin. Or anyone who has a heart, for that matter.

Lights Of The City is played out on rain-glistening night streets scarred with disused tram lines, sagging with ghost-empty buildings, and populated by lost souls and late risers, vagrants and immigrants, the ghosts of Beckett and Joyce and the chilly twin spectres of progress and grey reality. At the centre, the Allstars still have a warm alt-country heart, and thus even the most grittily urban of these vignettes are as agreeably stained by campfire-ash as they are from the soot and stench of town.

Barry McCormack's lonesome prairie invocations have never sounded better; as well, his brother Niall's reedy and wiggling voice, which long held the charm of a budgie being dragged across a chalkboard, has finally been harnessed and now infects songs like 'Caught In A Mess' and 'Guests Of The Nation' with a wild-eyed, skinny urgency. Angular bursts of Rhodes and piano bring poppier numbers a wired, early-Elvis Costello edginess; elsewhere, underplayed, human-sized atmospherics backdrop some of the most tender, clear-eyed songwriting you are going to hear this year.

Dublin almost doesn't deserve such gentle, ardent suitors.