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| Press Release |
| Maria Doyle Kennedy - Are you shedding your skin again? |
|
That’s the question Maria Doyle Kennedy posed on ‘Revenge Is Sour’ from her first album.
Three years after the release of that acclaimed debut, she might ask the same question of
herself. The coming weeks see her back on the road blooding songs for her imminent second
record, a rapidly evolving work in progress slated for release next year.
Charm (2001) was a triumph of self-determination that encompassed everything from unadulterated Rock’n’Roll to left-field Americana and the kind of lyrical sensibility that suggested Lorca rewriting creepy Eastern European fairytales. It also yielded a slew of singles, including ‘Without U’, ‘Babes’ and ‘Stars Above’. A lot has happened since then. She set up her own Mermaid label, garnered a brace of Meteor Award nominations, presided over the release of the Sirens compilation (featuring Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Lisa Germano among others) and more to the point, toured relentlessly at home and all over Europe, playing Glastonbury and Witnness, all the time forging the new sounds and textures demanded by her rapid growth as a singer, bandleader and songwriter. The forthcoming shows are the culmination of this process. Live, Maria and her collaborators have cohered and evolved, the result being a brittle, often wintery sensibility that’s as haunting as it is visceral. References? Everything from 4AD left-field rock to icy Germanic rhythms to cardinal blues. Songs like the pulsing ‘Opera’ or ‘Here You Come’ or ‘Stuck’. Songs that sound like SOS signals. Songs like ‘Not Beholden’ and ‘Have You Seen Him’, that could’ve migrated from Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary to Flannery O’ Connor’s short stories, scripted by Pedro Almodovar and photographed by Robbie Muller. But only MDK could sing them. |
