Album Review: The Curious Hand by Seamus Fogarty

After apprenticeships with the innovative small Scottish labels Fence and Lost Map, Seamus Fogarty has joined the big league with Domino Records. This stunning, mercurial album shows us why. Held together by Fogarty’s lovely unadorned voice, it constantly unwinds and uncoils, taking us on magical journeys through fable and modern life and back again, often in the same song.

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This Irish singer-songwriter may ply his trade as a folkie – meaning his shows are him with guitar and banjo – but on record he becomes an electronic shape-shifter, layering songs in beats, loops, hisses, clunks, wheezes, found sounds and bites of conversation. His storylines, delivered with rueful hindsight, are similarly surprising. Carlow Town relates a night crashed out in a church, awakening to a mass.

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Photo by Jo Higgs (Ed. Note: Domino sent Dusted an version of the Curious Hand which is in a different order than the final and includes two additional songs: "Song for John" and "The Power.") Seamus Fogarty makes shaggy songs, rumpled as if they'd been slept in rough, and plaintive at their core but with a shrugging, wry, what-are-ya-gonna-do sense of humor. Though mostly acoustic, leaning heavily on strummed guitar with some lovely melancholy fiddle, viola and maybe cello for accents, his songs also incorporate electronics and evocative field recordings.

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