Areas of High Traffic

Yorkshire-based Ulsterman Damien O’Kane is a familiar name from his key role alongside his wife, Kate Rusby, in her band, as well as for previous incarnations of Anglo-Irish band Flook and his duo with accordionist Shona Kipling. His first solo album since 2010's Summer Hill finds him in territory that's both familiar and utterly foreign. On the one hand, he delves here deeply and respectfully into traditional material like ‘The Blacksmith’ and ‘I Am a Youth’, the kind of songs that, by his own admission, are so iconic that he had hitherto ‘avoided them like the plague.’ On the other hand, he does so in a musically adventurous manner, fearlessly embracing a sophisticated mix of jazz, rock and world influences that may well raise the hackles of purists. Rusby's voice is a perfect fit for O’Kane's sweetly-rugged vocals. The album's only contemporary song, Robin Williams and Jerome Clark's poignant ‘Don’t Let Me Come Home a Stranger’, was her suggestion and fits perfectly with the album's pervading themes of emigration and nostalgia. She also contributes predictably lovely harmony vocals to ‘The Banks of the Bann’. O’Kane's brand-new, and equally lovely, tune is demonstrative of the album's engaging mixture of the beloved old with the bracingly new.