“Swimming the Horses” by Gerry O’Beirne

Leslie Fish

review

— www.gerryobeirne.com
Released 2019

Out in the odd and unclassifiable corners of the music biz one sometimes comes across remarkable little gems like this one. I suppose you could call it folkmusic, of a sort, and definitely Celtic, of a sort, but it’s primarily weird and wondrous.

First, there’s the physical album itself: a simple CD with only minimal artwork on the disc. The cover is simply three linked envelopes of stiff card-stock paper, which fold together to make a remarkably sturdy CD case with no plastic whatever. There are no liner notes and only minimal information on the cover, which is plain white with a single cover image: a sepia-tinted black-and-white photo of a lean and rangy horse — which I take to be an Irish thoroughbred — gleaming wet and shining like polished bronze as he walks out of a pool of water. This relates to the album title, but only deepens the mystery of just what that means. That’s explained in the first, title, song — but right away another marvel appears.

By the second song on the album, “The Last King of Feothanach”, I’d gotten the eerie impression that Leonard Cohen has risen from the grave — in Ireland. There’s the same style of intricate impressionistic poetry, set to deceptively simple tunes — where they’re songs at all: three of the pieces are instrumentals — and even O’Beirne’s voice sounds like a younger, lighter Leonard Cohen. However, he’s very much more distinctly Irish, as his tunes reveal. Also, he pays much more attention to instrumentation and subtly complex harmonies. I confess I never before heard a ukulele played to sound like a harp, but he makes it work — and beautifully. I was surprised to see that the songs were of average length — the longest is 4 minutes and 33 seconds — because they all seemed so short when they were finished. Where did those minutes go? O’Bierne certainly has the Celtic gift of musical enchantment.

Downloads of “Swimming the Horses” are available from Bandcamp and CD Baby, but I’d strongly recommend the clarity of precision of real CDs. You don’t want to miss the subtleties.