Reviews

Her music is a little bit jazzy and a little bit folksy, so it's not surprising that Mara Carlyle has been compared to Norah Jones. But Carlyle, who's best known for her work with electronica group Plaid, is a lot more interesting than Ravi Shankar's multi-platinum selling daughter.

Mara Carlyle

Crawdaddy, Dublin

Looking like a slightly racy 1920s debutante in her drop-waisted black frock and glossy bob, Carlyle is accompanied by a guitarist-cum-bazouki player, a double-bassist, and three angelic-voiced backing singers.

Her music is an utterly unique mixture of chanson, folk, electronica and sweetly old-fashioned popular music, and her voice is astonishing, a pure folk lilt that at times soars to dizzying heights.

Her lyrics are equally magical, laced with vivid fairytales that in less skilled hands could be irritatingly whimsical, but instead are genuinely enchanting. She even plays the musical saw.

And while her live show is inevitably not as lush as her recorded work, the songs don't suffer from the pared-down accompaniment.

So when Carlyle announces, halfway through the set, that she's going to do what she calls her "Gaelic song", one assumes that she's going to perform a wistful sean nós. Instead, she launches into a rousing version of that Gaeltacht summer college standard, Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile, to the general delight of the crowd (who sing along heartily in the choruses).

Carlyle seems genuinely charmed with the enthusiastic response of the crowd, who call for not one but two encores, even though she laughingly admits that she doesn't have any more songs to sing when she emerges for the second. But even though this is her first ever solo tour and she admits that she's "absolutely terrified", she rises to the occasion beautifully, performing the mournful Lost to the Sea. Anna Carey

Joanne Newsom

Sugar Club, Dublin

She's been touted as the Appalachian Björk, but Joanne Newsom's reference points are a touch more esoteric than that monicker might suggest.

A San Franciscan harpist with a voice that does, in fact, bear some kinship to the Icelandic one's whooping and hollering, but not without stopping off for some refreshment in the vicinity of Shirley Temple's Good Ship Lollipop and Jane Horrocks' Little Voice, Newsom cuts a pathway where few have bothered to tread.

Her music owes less to Appalachia than it does to an urban disconnect, replete with autistic-like references to mining the intricate seams of human relationships (I have read the right books/To interpret your looks).

Newsom's command of her harp is impressive in its authority and versatility. Far from handling it like the bone china so beloved of the likes of Mary O'Hara, she transforms it in turn into a bass guitar and then a piano, with enough backbone to cut to the core of her idiosyncratic melodies. These are songs that trouble themselves none with traditional notions of verse, chorus and verse; Newsom's sky is a whole lot different in colour to the rest of the world's, and so her music makes up its own rules as it goes along.

She navigates a territory that whispers of the surreality of Twin Peaks, with tales of tumbleweeds and pine cones tripping from her lips. Peppering her songs with the barest of introductions, Newsom delivers with an almost dyspraxic effortfulness, as though the transition from speaking to singing were akin to swapping her native tongue for one with which she is barely familiar.

Still, with tales of The Sprout And The Bean and What We Have Known, she succeeded in questioning every cliché, every lazy expectation we've come to make about music these days. Newsom breaks all the rules, not just for the hell of it, but because she doesn't know what they are in the first place. A refreshing alternative to colour by numbers newcomers. Siobhán Long

Preston Reed

The Hub, Dublin

One popular misconception about virtuoso guitarists is that these men keep their hair long because it may be considered acceptable, or even desirable. This is not true. Guitarists wear their hair long because it is the source of all their power.

Witness Preston Reed, perhaps the most awesome exponent of giddying solo guitar and wittily unorthodox methods, tossing his Samsonite silver tresses over one shoulder before surging into Ladies Night.

It may be the most ironic title with which to treat his small, faithful and predominantly male following.

As Reed hammers and pinches the strings, both hands curled above the fretboard like a busy concert pianist or an over-worked typist, in the tiny slivers between notes he pads out a brisk beat on the body of his Ovation guitar.

This extraordinary Scotland-based, American guitarist is not so much listened to, as watched intently.

It's easy to understand why. The audience bears all the tell-tale signs - slightly longer fingernails on one hand, calloused fingertips on the other, picks warm in their wallets. "Are you enjoying yourselves?" says Reed, and he's right to ask.

Heads do not nod, feet do not tap, chins are contemplatively pinched. They roar their approval of course, but they are here, it seems, for musicianship rather than music.

This is a shame, not only because Reed's fiendishly intricate blend of blues, rock, country and metal styles ducks and weaves itself away from measurability, but also because he has nothing to teach us. If you already know why to coo at a Fender Strat, or giggle at a hollow-bodied Gibson, you are too corrupted to be Reed's apprentice.

Beguiled instead by the shifting blues of Night Ride or the plangent progression of False Spring; braced besides by the fleshy power of Overture or the odd caress of Franzl's Saw, Reed's blurry frets begin to dissolve from view. Grow your hair. Shut your eyes. Listen. Peter Cawley