Path Across The Ocean

BARRY GLEESON: “Path Across The Ocean” (Wavelength)

THOUGH HE sings mainly in a sort of a sean-nós, lilting style, Dubliner Barry Gleeson is not a prisoner of that particular tradition. With his deep resonant voice and wickedly sharp sense of humour, he covers a range of traditional and original songs on this enjoyable, if slightly offbeat, collection.

The title cut is one of the more serious songs on the album — a poignant post-famine saga of emigration which is accompanied by uileann pipes and the familiar harmonies of The Voice Squad. ‘The Mullingar Recruit’ tells the story of a farm labourer who falls asleep in the fields, dreams he has joined the British Army and has his legs blown off. Gleeson’s eccentric humour is displayed more fully on ‘Sleeveless Charms’, a bizarre, unbelievable tale of a lady having her arms chopped off by a waiter for failing to pay a restaurant bill!

Another example of this off-the-wall humour, ‘This Is Macaronic’, was inspired by the all-Ireland semi-final of 1983 when Dublin beat Cork at Pairc Ui Chaoimh: “I went with Liam O’Murchu to watch oul’ Cork being slaughtered/Duirt sé liom, tis looking glum, this time we’ve really bought it.”

‘Sweet Daffodil Mulligan’ is Gleeson’s arrangement of a song made famous in the 1930’s by Jimmy O’Dea and even Roddy Doyle in his wildest imagination could hardly conjure up a character like the ‘Shrieken Artaner’: “Maniac madman, you’ll find none insaner . . .me head ’tis in bits/I’m shiverin and tremblin’ in convulsive fits.”

The closing track on the album is a seven-minute epic entitled ‘Cupid’s Visitation To Mick O’Dwyer’ — a never-ending yarn of love, lust and mysterious goings-on which amounts to a veritable short story in terms of the lyrical content.

With assistance from Kevin Conneff, Goilin, Kevin Glackin and the Voice Squad, Path Across The Ocean is quirky, whimsical and at times downright bizarre. Modern urban folk music at its weirdest.

• Colm O’Hare