All of This Is Chance Lisa O'Neill Artist

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 provid... Read more

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). {|O'Neill|} 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. {|O'Neill|} 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 Less