Irish singer/songwriter
Lisa O'Neill
's distinctive provincial folk tales have made her a regional treasure over the years. She earned a well-deserved Choice Music Prize nomination for her potent 2018 effort,
Heard a Long Gone Song
, and provided the series finale of the bloody British period crime drama Peaky Blinders with a haunting cover of
Bob Dylan
's "All the Tired Horses." The
Rough Trade
-issued
All of This Is Chance
is
O'Neill
's fifth long-player and her first to be distributed stateside. Her lilting, rough-hewn cadence carries with it the weight, strength, and spry humor of her homeland, and her storytelling rings true and grounded, even at its most mystic and confounding. The powerful title cut assembles itself from the opening lines of Irish poet
Patrick Kavanaugh
's poem "The Great Hunger" ("Clay is the word and clay is the flesh/Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move").
expands on the piece's themes of poverty, loneliness, and connection to the land with wise gravitas. She punctuates the spare, banjo-led "Silver Seed" with whoops and hollers ("Who make a woman out of me?/No cross can claim my gladness/Tame my madness") and laments humanity's disconnect with the natural world on the lush and incredibly moving "Old Note."
closes the album with the lullaby "Goodnight World," written for an Australian production of The Boy Who Talked to Dogs, an adaptation of Martin McKenna's 2014 memoir about bullying, bravery, and resilience. It's a fitting end to a collection of songs that reap empathy from the seeds of discord and a subtle reminder that the "big old bold world" is neither friend nor foe. ~ James Christopher Monger