From Mizen to Malin, Clare Sands has traced a snaking musical path the length of the west coast over the past two years. This Cork fiddle player and singer/songwriter (who also counts guitar, keyboards and percussion among her instruments) has music embedded deep within her genes, with Tommy Sands a cousin.
On her self-titled debut, she paints from a rich palette of found sounds, spoken word, fiery percussion and a lyrical exuberance that propels the whole enterprise ever onwards. Her appetite for collaboration is writ large too, with equally adventurous contributions from Steve Cooney, Susan O’Neill, Tommy Sands. Fiachna Ó Braonáin and Manchán Magan.
Sands’s reach is wide and deep, and this collection speaks most of all of resilience and of solidarity, of friendship and kinship, and of the deep human need for connection. In all of these ways, it’s an album so deeply rooted in its time, in our time, a pandemic gestation that has yielded a rich harvest. Sands’ lyrical preoccupations find rich expression in both Irish and English, sometimes bringing to mind the whirling dervish qualities of the Hothouse Flowers, while at others, her Feistian vocals (particularly on Sail On) hint at an artist who is at the beginning of an odyssey to locate her own voice.
Jagged-edged observations
Her ear for rhythm and richly hewn, jagged-edged observations on life’s smaller and bigger questions draws spoken word excerpts from Seán, a Connamara fisherman and from the irrepressible Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, whose words on Focail feasta resonate deeply with the prescience of Margaret Atwood. Her single, Awe na Mná references mythical and real life heroines boldly, from Granuaile to Queen Maeve and Maggie Barry, and is clearly a song to be heard in a live setting, preferably outdoors, where the song can entwine with dervish dance, as its genetic code requires.
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At times, the production can be overburdened by an excess of orchestration, when simplicity lets a song shimmer in the heat just fine. This is true for I See No Light but Yours, with Sands’ voice accompanied mostly by cello and fiddle: a beautiful doffing of her cap to the sean nós singer, Seosamh Ó hÉanaí.
This fine debut revels in Sands’ innate and fearless curiosity, and her insistence on digging deep beneath the surface, in search of nuggets that can help make sense of the world around her. She never opts for easy chord sequences or for predictable lyrical choices. Sands is a musician who knows the price of gestation and the value of clear expression.
A mighty first step on what promises to be a lifelong expedition.
