Kieran Halpin
Album: It's Always 3:15
Label: SOS
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.kieranhalpin.com

… and it's always good to see this fine songwriter releasing a new album of original songs. For I just don't know how Kieran continually comes up with so much top-class material, especially since Kieran's personal style is so very distinctive that there's bound to be an air of familiarity about each successive release, a familiarity that's both comforting and challenging. Here, the opening (title) track is ushered in on a quintessential, trademark Halpin chord progression - and yet this is no revisit of Angel Of Paradise; the ambiguities of relationships here reflected in the unfolding of the lyric, leading inexorably to the central imponderable ("For every word I find a place in every line I write But sometimes I don't know what I mean").

Kieran's gift for observation of the human condition and public and private behaviour is as keen as ever, and the degree of knowing realism with which he depicts these traits is invariably tempered with an edgy conciseness of expression. There's no wasting of precious minutes or words, and songs like The Future Is Past and the singularly bleak This Road Ends enjoy a profundity of utterance within their signature brevity and economy. A mantra of repetition is well used to convey a stifling situation on The Way and This Love Will Bury Me. Moments of particular emotional weight, where Kieran's passion and compassion are aligned, cannot escape being discussed by employing a higher word-count, for sure, as on The Junction, a telling account of a doomed relationship where there can never be a winner.

Anger and passion are spat out venomously on Ben Parkinson's Friends, a powerhouse commentary on those needless wars that condemns received attitudes and expectations. But all is not lost, for there is still hope and reassurance (even tho' the song itself may be titled Sorrow).

On a purely musical basis, It's Always 3:15 finds Kieran in strictly solo live-in-the-studio mode, maximum concentration and maximum intimacy, voice and guitar only but with just a few overdubs on guitar or vocal chorus here and there. Style-wise, Kieran adheres to his signature modus operandi for the majority of the new album, but there are a couple of tracks which depart from the norm, with interesting and appealing results. The country-waltz is a most unusual mode for Kieran, and the bittersweet Angels Are Smiling has much of the air of a Richard/Linda Thompson excursion in that genre (yes, that's a compliment!), while Everyone Loves Someone triumphantly engages with the simple, classic folk-troubadour demeanour of Jackson C. Frank/Tom Paxton/early Dylan. So there's something for everyone here on Kieran's latest CD, which proves the man's losing none of his touch, his bite or his conscience.

David Kidman