reviewed by Eoin Dolan
dazedoblivioncfb@gmail.com
The album Hill of Thieves by Irish singer Cara Dillon was released in the U.S. last September, with precious little fanfare, but this brilliant album is receiving plenty of critical acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic, where it recently won Album of the Year at the 2010 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Cara Dillon, who hails from Dungiven in County Derry, is from a very musical family and has been singing all her life; she is the younger sister of Mary Dillon, singer for Déanta. At age 14, Cara Dillon won the won the All Ireland Singing Trophy. In 2004, she won Best Irish Female at the Meteor awards.
In 2006, Dillon and her husband Sam Lakeman became the parents of twin boys who miraculously survived being born 14 weeks prematurely. It was a harrowing experience for the young couple, and afterwards they made the decision to start their own record label, Charcoal Records. Using their newfound freedom of owning their own label, they set out to make an album on their own terms and, because they had little time to write new music, they decided to create an album of traditional Irish folk songs and to keep it simple and recorded in one or two takes. The results of this simplicity are amazing.
There is just one original song on the album: the title track that leads off the album,“Hill of Thieves.” It is an ode to her homeland by Dillon who now lives in Somerset in England. The song’s name comes from the hill of Benbradagh (meaning “thief’s hill”) that looms to the east of Dungiven. It’s a beautiful track that features terrific work on whistle by Brian Finnegan and manages to fit perfectly with the other traditional songs. The magic of this album comes of course from the gorgeous singing of Cara Dillon, but also from the outstanding supporting musicians and, very importantly, the superb way in which these songs are arranged by Sam Lakeman. Lakeman has a genius for taking a traditional tune and, in his own words, “inventing the harmonic structure around it” so that it becomes as immediate as a song written yesterday. “Spencer the Rover” is a noteworthy example of this. It features close harmonies sung by Dillon and her brother-in-law Seth Lakeman, a successful folk artist in the UK. “She Moved Through The Fair” and “The Verdant Braes of Skreen” are moving examples of the melancholy chemistry between Dillon’s singing and Sam Lakeman’s piano. One of the repeated themes in the music of Cara Dillon is emigration. “The Parting Glass,” a song that dates to at least the 17th Century, captures perfectly the solemn emotion of an American wake. “False, False” is another gem both in terms of technique and emotion and was captured live during the filming of her DVD The Redcastle Sessions. The songs of heartbreak and loss on the album are balanced nicely with splendid performances of the brighter tracks “Johnny, Lovely Johnny”; “Jimmy Mó Mhíle Stór”; and “P Stands for Paddy.” This album has the feel of a future classic among American fans of Celtic music.
