Cormac O Caoimh
Album: The Moon Loses It's Memory
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 14
Website: http://www.cormacocaoimh.net/

Cormac O Caoimh is a singer-songwriter and classical guitarist from Cork, Ireland, his warm and delicate guitar combines to make an enthralling and striking third solo album. His words speak a little louder to match the photography of William Crowley whose images accompany each track in the album's booklet. Each track twists through your mind pulling at your emotions as you listen, taking you this way and that through the various narrative layers. Each, sometimes abstract, photograph encompasses the track with a subtle tint of awe and the unknown.

The album begins with the heartwarming folk-pop vibes Cormac O Caillmh is associated with. There is a tone to Cormac's voice that has the ability to make you feel like you know him, as though you are listening to a familiar friend describe a place or event. His vocals convey a feeling of ease as if you are being read a story whilst sat in a comfy rocking chair, however there is a deeper transition through songs such as 'Burning Coal' & 'Lay low for a while', which despite the ever warming and inviting vocals have an eerie and murkier exciting quality, offering subtle warning hints to the audience, delving deeper into human cognition.

The title track could almost be a piece by Pink Floyd's lost man Sid Barrett just before he finally lost his way. It is typical of the way the album appears to be playing with one's mind- feeding on memory, thought and emotion- highlighted by the dreamlike starkness of the photographs paired with which the tracks are paired.

This album has an edge of starkness, less apparent on his earlier albums, which magnifies and reveals itself through the album, and is particularly apparent on 'Basement' where the monster of the song is the personification of darker inner thoughts...

For fans of Nick Drake this perhaps is a modern addition to the collection.

Leah Parker-Turner