This Is The Day

When everybody’s yelling for your attention, it’s the soft voice that catches your ear. It’s this quality in Christy Moore’s voice that moved Warren Ellis enough to name the closing tune on the last Dirty Three album after the balladeer.

Certainly, there aren’t many artists strong or sure enough of character to whisper against the overpowering vomit of the age: the legions of repugnant salesmen reaching out of the telly proffering the devil’s lilies (“Where there’s blame there’s a claim”); the shysters who surcharge you to lend them money; the unsolicited e-mails and stacks of remaindered newspapers and landslides of junk mail; the constant yakkety-yak…

Contrasted with all this, a few sane words from Christy start to sound like gospel. He’s almost comically out of time, a protest singer standing in front of a steamroller economy, insisting that the trickledown theory doesn’t work unless you’re getting pissed on.

On his last album Traveller, Moore set to cutting away at the cancer at the heart of present day Hibernia; this time, rather than trying to keep up with ever mutating viruses, he’s seeking out antidotes, commemorating figures such as Guerin and Guevara and Chilean singer Victor Jara, tortured and murdered by Pinochet’s pinheads.

And yet, when Christy does vent spleen, the tongue is wicked – witness his castigation of Sunday paper snitches on ‘Scaldcrows’. Elsewhere, men do battle with the bottle (‘Jack Doyle’) or try to shuck off the scar tissue of a broken heart (‘Cry Like A Man’). A woman, sick of her drunken husband’s abuse, stitches him into his blankets and batters him with a frying pan (‘Stitch In Time’).

In its sonic and thematic clarity, this is a record that’s probably best considered alongside Heaney’s Electric Light and Kennelly’s Glimpses rather than the see-what-shit-sticks disgorgings of the multinationals. Moore’s worldview is often what you’d expect of a man who’s had a few shots across his heart’s bows: the commonest things take on an almost Blake-like beauty; the rain that “puts a shine on the chestnut spikes” (‘So Do I’), or “the purple trees, the speckled hen and the seaweed man” (‘Piper’s Path’). In such moments, This Is The Day is about as real as it gets.