All of This Is Chance

Fresh from signing off Peaky Blinders with a cover of Bob Dylan's ‘All the Tired Horses’, O’Neill returns to her roots with her first album in five years for her debut on Rough Trade. O’Neill's world view is as distinctive as her turf-coloured voice, and this album is a love song to the natural world and a lament for its despoilment. It's also the singer-songwriter's finest outing on disc to date.

Inspired by poet Patrick Kavanagh, the title-track is an invitation into a soil-rooted, sky-lit sense of otherness as beguiling as it is compelling. In ‘Old Note’, O’Neill's cracked, timeless vocals sit above Colm Mac Con Iomaire's shimmering instrumental carpet, counterpointed by her young niece's bewitching commentary. ‘Whisht, the Wild Workings of the Mind’ casts its own spell with Mic Geraghty's baritonal harmonium and David Coulter's sirenic saw. ‘Birdy From Another Realm’, one of several songs with an ornithological accent, is a Blakeian vision complete with clucking avian banjo and forlorn fiddle. The stilled, introspective ‘The Globe’ contrasts infant innocence with regretful adult perspective, the closing ‘Goodnight World’ is as sweet a lullaby as any, with O’Neill's fragile, tremulous delivery. In a word: mesmeric.