Shine

Caroline Keane has had an increasingly prominent presence on the Irish and international touring circuit since she was 15. Now in her early 20s and newly graduated with a master’s degree from the Irish World Academy of Music and Drama in her native Limerick, her profile is boosted by a debut solo album marked by graceful musicality and lightly worn technique.

Shine sees Keane building on the contemporary sound crafted with FourWinds since 2013 (evidenced on their own eponymous debut) and the more traditional accents of Never Say Goodbye, Say Good Luck with fellow band member, piper Tom Delany. Judiciously blending old and new, Keane displays an obvious debt to her venerable teacher Noel Hill, but other influences – Niall Vallely, Liz Carroll, Vincent Broderick, Josephine Keegan – are also felt, vividly so in the dexterous, free-flowing duet with fiddler Laura Kerr on Tommy Peoples’ ‘Gráinne’s Jig/Don’t Touch That Green Linnet’.

Gerry O’Byrne’s lilting air ‘When You’re Gone I Say Your Name’ finds Keane at her most poetic, and a trio of traditional slides with fiddler Jeremy Spencer at her most energetic. Her own compositions include an animated jig and ‘The Wine Strand Hornpipe’, a delightful product of a wet, car-bound visit to a West Kerry beach. Joyful.