Reviews

Irish Timescritics review the world of the arts

Paddy Casey
CrawDaddy, Dublin

Maybe it's something to do with it being a Monday night, but the usually messianic fervour that Paddy Casey is greeted with is strangely muted.

Having clocked up more than 220,000 sales from his first two albums and with album number three in the shops in a matter of days, the diminutive troubadour has decided to return to the live circuit with a string of intimate shows (this is the first of three Dublin gigs in three different venues this week).

His passionate fan base has propelled Casey to headline gigs in the RDS and a support slot with U2 while touring his 2003 breakthrough, Living. However, the Dubliner has failed to carry his success overseas. Having recorded much of his new album in LA, Addicted to Company (Part 1) sees the former busker loosen the singer-songwriter shackles that burdened earlier releases and embrace a more soul-filled sound, not afraid to turn the volume up when he wants and slow the tempo down when required.

His two-hour set mixes crowd favourites such as Lucky One, Everybody Wants and Whatever Gets You True (although the latter limps to a close as the singer's request for the audience to sing along appears to fall on deaf ears) with newer cuts. Using his band to the full, Not Out To Get You, a ragtime love song "that should be in Bugsy Malone", displays an adventurousness previously missing from his work. City comes across like a glam-rock reading of Blackstreet's No Diggity, but Tonight veers dangerously close to MOR blandness for comfort. Saints and Sinners, unsurprisingly, gets the biggest reaction of the night and an encore including Bend Down Low has all the girls swooning.

Non-converted Paddy-philes in the crowd could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about, but it's hard not to soften to the coy, self-deprecating persona that Casey presents, even if it must belie a determined ambition. There's a long road ahead: there will be bigger venues with more enthusiastic crowds and, no doubt, huge album sales in Ireland, so perhaps that - to quote soulful new single Addicted to Company - is enough for tonight.

Brian Keane

David Creevy (guitar)
NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Guitarist David Creevy dedicated this recital at the NCH John Field Room "in part to the families and friends of the victims of 9/11" and also to the memory of his own father, Philip, who died last year. In his spoken introductions, he endeavoured to find a spiritual angle for all of the pieces in an evening that ranged from Bach and Barrios Mangoré to Andrés Segovia, Yuquijiro Yocoh and Carlo Domeniconi.

And he also helped set the tone of the evening by giving the programme a title, Sail Through Twilight.

Both the chosen pieces and the style of the performances favoured a mostly sombre emotional tone, as if the idea was to create a sense of timelessness into which to project guitar sounds of rounded beauty.

In programming terms, it was a risky strategy. Performers eschew the benefits of contrast at their own peril, and even the flavour of the closing Suite del Recuerdo by José Luis Merlin, with its evocation of the manners of pop songs, didn't quite dispel the mood of sameness that had settled on the evening.

The effect could be compared to that of extremely careful elocution in speech, with the shaping of the word casting a kind of hypnotic spell that can overcome the actual meaning of the words.

Creevy seemed to want to dwell in a pool of gentle memories, as if the recollection of the deceased is actually rather one-sided, and the world of the spirit excludes anything in the way of excitement or really outgoing celebration.

In terms of the music-making itself, this meant that rhythmic integrity was sometimes sacrificed on the altar of mood creation and smooth contouring, that tempos were generally relaxed, and that incisiveness and flamboyance were held in check. As a demonstration of the kind of thing Classic FM pursues under titles such as Smooth Classics, it made its point.

It was impressive in its own way, but a full evening recital seemed really too great a length over which to stretch that point.

Michael Dervan