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Review: 'LUCKY BONES'
'Someone's Son'   

-  Label: 'Lucky Bones Promotions'
-  Genre: 'Alt/Country' -  Release Date: '8th July 2014'-  Catalogue No: 'LBCD003'

Our Rating:
Dubliner Eamonn O'Connor's first album - Together We Are All Alone - was recorded in Texas with session musicians from Austin.

To make this follow up he returned to the same studio and producer- Stephen Ceresia - but this time uses Irish musicians Leon Kennedy (bass), Conor Miley (keys) and Peter O'Grady (guitars). Their speciality is to play downbeat songs at a strident tempo.

O'Connor's songs draw from an acoustic folk tradition yet his sound owes more to electric roots music and it comes as no surprise to learn that his musical heroes include Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

Although he sets his sights high, one of O'Connor's weaknesses as a songwriter is that he too often opts for safe platitudes. For example, he compares the world to a wheel or life to a river. This means that his songs often have an anonymous quality even when he's touching upon more personal topics.

A serious misfire is Born To A Holy Land, an anti war song about an unnamed conflict which seems completely at odds with all the other songs on this collection.

O'Connor sings of innocent victims, soldiers as pawns and delusions of freedom but the lack of specificity means that it feels like a check list of arguments against war rather than prompted by genuine sense of outrage. It ends with the somewhat disengenuous question: "Will there come a day when the world will exist in a pure harmony?". I think we all know the answer to that one!

He's on firmer ground when addressing the recurring theme of lovers separated by physical or psychological distance. This is undoubtedly something of an occupational hazard for a musician who habitually tours on both sides of the Atlantic.   

On Who's Gonna Follow Me Down, it's as if he is imagining where this will all end. It is told from the perspective of an old man who, having ascertained that there's a heaven above and a hell below, seems sure what direction he'll be heading come judgement day.

Ornithological metaphors figure in three songs. "I wish I was a bird, not this wingless man" he sings on Forever With Wings while on the country ballad Someone's Son the drawbacks of winged flight are noted: "Now I'm a bird that is flying right into a gale".

The opening track (She Don't Know) tells the sad tale of a woman who moves from the country to the city only to meet a tragic end : "she means less than a dead bird buried beneath the snow".

The Usual Places, closes the album on a high note and features some fine fiddle playing by Sean Orr. On this, and other tunes, O'Connor portrays himself as rootless and restless troubadour.

This is an album where the lure of the Americana dream dominates the band's sound yet, ironically, it is the songs that reveal O'Connor's Irish roots that are most effective.

Lucky Bones' website
  author: Martin Raybould

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LUCKY BONES - Someone's Son