Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies

Luke Daniels' four solo albums since his days as the well-respected button accordion virtuoso heard on Riverdance or with the Cara Dillon Band haven't exactly lacked for variety and invention. They have ranged boldly from baroque folk to a suite built around a reconstructed 19th-century musical instrument called a polyphon and from repurposed open-source audio to a collection of adult-themed songs based around children's folk rhymes. For his fifth collection, new songs and narratives are fashioned around snippets of English poetry from the past 700 years.

In some cases just a few words from Dryden, Browning, Auden and others have been reworked as lines and imagery, while elsewhere whole phrases from, for instance, Chaucer's ‘Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’ have been transmuted within Daniels' own songs, cheekily referred to in the sleeve notes as ‘collaborations.’ Musically, it's nearly as audacious with a core trio consisting of Daniels on vocals, acoustic guitar and piano, Jenny Hill from Songs of Separation on double bass and Signy Jakobsdottir from Scottish Ballet on percussion, augmented by Chinese guzheng player Zi Lan Lao, South African cellist Abel Selaocoe and Syrian oud player Rihab Azar as well as the Arco String Quartet from Belfast and The Donegal Abbey Singers. The overall effect can be startling or even slightly disquieting, but invariably inventive and enthralling.