Since their last release 1999’s Restless Home the line up has changed significantly. Orion’s latest album Strawberry Town has been five years in the making. Ger Wolfe’s music is Bardic in its perceptions, his prose is intelligent, witty and carefully crafted, in a nut shell this beautifully played modern Irish music. The city boy from Mayfield in Cork is happiest when he takes a decidedly bucolic rural ramble, his world and music have a surface quality that speaks of the open air and of the soft Irish country side, I could cite I have been loved’ and ‘Look At That Old Field’ as ones to listen to cartefully for their delicate haunting poetry, but there is a hard edge to his writing, that can take us to the margin of the precipice, where the familiar can fall into chaos, and for an example I can think of nothing better on this album than the The Grey Crow which on its surface is about a grey crow scavenging but deeper down was inspired by Christine Buckley’s work on exposing clerical abuse in institutions of the state over the last century especially. I re-recorded these to mark the passage of time.” And in doing sop he has given them new life and new meanings. The Curra Road is a song I previously recorded in 2002 and similarly The Fallen Branches is from my debut album ‘Word and Rhyme” 1998. Others are very new, including I have been loved, probably my newest from late 2008 and No bird sang from about 2 years ago. “I’ve had some of the songs for a long time, for instance ‘Take my hand’ and ‘lay me down’ were both written at the time of the Bosnian Serb/ Croat war of the mid to late 1990’s. The intimacy achieved by one voice and guitar telling its truths to the listener makes for a singular listening experience.” Some of the tracks are new, some re-workings from his previous albums as he told me in a recent IMM interview: “In many ways the spared down acoustic approach of combining Ger Wolfe’s voice and nylon string guitar recalls the approach adopted by Leonard Cohen in his 60s albums Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room. It has trademark song writing and melodic depth his work has developed within the last decade.” He hit the nail on the head and he went on to say
Using a voice and guitar combination ably produced by Peadar O Riada, the result is immediately intimate and personal. John O’Reagn wrote “No Bird Sang – Ger Wolfe’s fifth album goes back to the acoustic roots of his music. That reflects the creation of the original book in the centuries before the discovery of perspective duringn the Renaissance.Want to see earlier releases? Visit the archive.
The colors are bold and bright the drawings are simplified and 2-D. Just as every margin of the Book of Kells is crowded with minute and glorious decorations, so is every shot of the film filled with patterns and borders, arches and frames, do-dads and scrimshaw images. This and his further adventures are related in Tomm Moore's film, which is a little like an illuminated manuscript itself. He can start by disobeying the Abbot ( Brendan Gleeson), venturing outside the walls, and gathering the nuts. Some pages remain to be created, and Aidan says Brendan must help. Brendan (voice of Evan McGuire), the youngest and pluckiest monk in the walled monastery, befriends old Brother Aidan ( Mick Lally), a traveler who has arrived bearing the precious book. Perhaps some of that brilliant emerald green was his, extracted from nuts he gathered in the forest. It is a painstakingly illuminated medieval manuscript preserving the four gospels, and every page is a work of art. The Irish are a verbal people, preserving legends in story and song few Chicagoans may know there's a First Folio of Shakespeare in the Newberry Library, but few Dubliners do not know that the Book of Kells reposes in Trinity College. If there are not, how does she know for sure?
If there are any leprechauns, she no doubt knows them. The fairy girl is quite real, as Brendan can see for himself. Here is a film about a young and very brave medieval monk named Brendan, a sacred book, a storied monastery, a fairy girl, an alarming creature and a forest containing little nuts that make brilliant green inks. What does this possibly have to do with "The Secret of Kells," one of this year's Oscar nominees for best animated feature? Quite a bit, I think.
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