Magical Ring

Ireland has had little to celebrate in the last year so, as it ran further and further aground on recession and unemployment. As a result almost hysterical hopes are invested in our few achievers – the saddest example being the media madness that prefaced the unfortunate Irish rugby team’s ill-fated trip to Cardiff the other week. Well, with so few heroes and so many villains, you can hardly blame the unfortunate population.

As it happens, one of the areas most heavily battered by government taxes and duties, not to mention the impact of decreased spending power from the recession, is music. And, almost as a deliberate illustration of the old law that the arts triumph in adversity, music, and lets call it progressive popular music in particular), has already provided us with some of our most notable achievers for 1983.

U2’s staggering leap to the top of the album charts in Britain is the most striking at the moment, but the new albums currently emerging from Clannad and Scullion, as well as recent singles achievements abroad by Auto Da Fe and Tokyo Olympics, show quite clearly that in spite of the country’s poverty, musicians have come of age with a vengeance, and across a formidable range of styles.

Young musicians may still be too inclined to clone U2, Joy Division, and Electro pop, but all the above-mentioned artists, as well as Paul Brady, Moving Hearts, et al, have mapped out many, many more paths to the expression of pride and passion, thoughts and feelings, poetry, wit and venom through music, as well as an appreciable identity for modern Irish music.

You can’t single out any one bunch of people from the many – all you can do is lament the single minded fashion-consciousness of the international media and music industry, in Britain in particular, that simply demands levels of hipness, sophistication and saleability from Irish artists that it does not demand of its indigenous acts. Ah well – imperialism by any other name.

It’s all the more heartening then that a group such as Clannad, hailing from an area that is as ignored and undervalued by the rest of Ireland as the latter is by London, should have emerged late last year as one of our major contenders and are now following up with such a mature self-confident album.

Magical Ring is as close a humanly possible to the riddle posed by the success of ‘Harry’s Game’ – how to use a once-off and fortuitous (though thoroughly deserved), opportunity as a launching pad for a second phase of their international career.

Magical Ring strikes the balance – it has not abandoned the tradition from which Clannad derive their strength and identity, it has built on it. It hasn’t gone overboard on contemporary songs, nor instrumentation, indeed it is a more self-contained album in that respect than Fuaim, their last.

But it is still a major step forward from the latter album. The major areas of development are the use of synthesisers and vocoder, the treatment given to the voices in the mix and the use of random reggae-like effects. There is also, one must add, the fulfilment of promise in the vocals, especially Maire's, and the breathtaking harmonies.

One major potential weakness for an option-covering album aimed at a wide audience is that in the end it is neither here nor there – Magical Ring flirts with the weakness, but overall, and mainly through the strength of Clannad’s music, it skirts it.

In fact, the more one listens to this album the more one sees its underlying structure as a classic Clannad album.

Ironically there may well be a traditionalist reaction against their success – which will miss this fact. No less than five of the tracks are traditional and/or in Irish, each of which hallmarks the qualities that one associates with Clannad’s music – dignity, stateliness even, restraint, and an eagle-eyes northern sense of dynamics. As a matter of fact one of these tracks, ‘Coinleach Glas Fhomhair’ has an air that is so memorable that it could even be a hit single on the melody’s strength alone, and despite being long on lyrics in Irish.

Two tracks in particular will be singled out from Magical Ring, the already successful ‘Theme From Harry’s Game’ which opens side one, and ‘Newgrange’, on side two, which has already been hailed at length in the Hot Press some weeks back. ‘Newgrange’ surpasses ‘Harry’s Game’, if anything, for its cinematic depth, its epic feel, and the stunning, timeless blend of voice, synthesiser, perfectly timed drumheads, and a synth-whistle solo to take it out.

It is the third in a noble line, the first of which was ‘Mhorag’s Na h’Oro’ on ‘Fuaim’. Magnificent, evocative music that states the sensations of time and place, yet offers no hard and fast rules, and maintains a true sense of wonder.

All of which leaves three remaining tracks – ‘Tower Hill’, ‘Passing Time’, and Jim Rafferty’s ‘I See Red’ their new single. The latter is a nice, well-rounded classic post 1970s west-coasty song that will provide a strong argument in America. The swimming sounds of harp and string bass stamp it indelibly as Clannad, although the song itself is nothing special, say when compared with Pol O’Braonain’s ‘Tower Hill’, a gentle, evocative multi stringed song, with buoyant bass, mandolins, harp and whistle blending over riff that repeats like reggae.

Magical Ring is an album with a dual purpose. On the one hand it has to be a Clannad album, one that their fans will easily recognise and relate to, and on the other it has to signal their assault on new markets and new objectives. Not an easy blend to strike, and its a considerable pleasure to report that not only have they succeeded, but they’ve succeeded handsomely.