Mikey Kenney – The Reverie Road
Penny Fiddle Records – 7 February 2019
Mikey Kenney is a somewhat idiosyncratic (in the nicest possible way) talent. Perhaps he’s most simply described as a fiddle player and balladeer from Liverpool whose playing is steeped in both English and Irish traditional music. But he has more strings to his bow, as it were, not least as something of a multi-instrumentalist (he also plays banjo, mandolin, concertina and percussion on this album, albeit only occasionally). And there are even more strands to his musical activity, for he’s currently a member of the Band Of Burns celebration, and works regularly with Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela. Previous projects include Ottersgear and The Counsel Of Owls; the latter, which gave his 2016 solo album its title, was a beguiling affair, inhabiting an imaginative and quirky musical landscape that rather beautifully complemented both the enigmatic content of his songs and his extraordinary once-heard never-forgotten singing style.
Like the above solo album, The Reverie Road delivers a multitracked Mikey, but it differs from its predecessor by offering a higher proportion of tunes than songs, and as a result can probably be considered more immediately accessible generally, at least to the first-time listener. Happily, this doesn’t entail any compromise in musical inventiveness, and Mikey’s singing and playing still displays plenty of distinctive touches that charm and delight. The sense of delight is most apparent in the disc’s joyous instrumental items, where the sound-palette is gleefully extended beyond Mikey’s superbly charismatic fiddle playing by the judicious deployment of extra fiddle parts on several occasions and by the addition of banjo and bodhrán to the feast of fiddles on The Devil Coast Of Keady set and jingling morris bells and drum to the spirited 3/2 Lancashire tune Winder’s Hornpipe. Having said that, a leaner texture, involving deft pizzicato, embellishes the Golden Castle/Broken Pledge hornpipe set with equal effectiveness and imagination.
It’s not easy to put a tag or reference marker on Mikey’s songs; their construction is not exactly orthodox, yet it invariably makes a kind of weird sense and the musical argument tends not to be difficult to follow. Lyrically, Mikey’s songs have been described as impressionistic, although the “impression” is likely to be of a state of mind or a state of place. The Reverie Road is therefore well named for its invocation of what Mikey terms “a dreamy, intriguing journey to quell the world-weary soul and transport it to another time and place”. Meaning, in one sense, his home city of Liverpool (the slow-jig Up Hardman Street evokes memories of struggling up the hill to music sessions in local pub The Caledonia, while Kitty Wilkinson is a biographical account of a local heroine who cared for the poor of her community and whose name now adorns an Everton launderette that functions as both a community hub and creative space; another series of jigs – the genuinely solo Brigid’s Jigs set – was written for the band Hop The Sea, a group of cross-sea traditional musicians, as part of a commission for Liverpool’s Feast Of Fire). In another sense, the album’s journey embraces Mikey’s time travelling and working in Italy (on Montagna Di Menta, the song from whose lyric the album’s title is taken, rippling mandolins evoke Mikey’s quest to find his own musical rhythm, while Napoli portrays in music the unified expression of love that the city embodies). The first of the album’s songs, The Path I Walk Upon, is built around a series of images that frequent Mikey’s dreams and reflects upon their spiritual significance in the context of his conscience, and the elegant baroque-dance-styled strong setting fits this questioning mood. On the disc’s finale Soggy Desert, however, its overly rousing “Lanky-Calypso” musical setting arguably jars against (rather than working with) its intended evocation of the bleak, detritus-strewn Aldcliffe March on the Lune Estuary.
The Reverie Road is possibly a more musically unified collection than its predecessor, almost certainly due to its very strongly fiddle-centric identity. Anyone new to Mikey’s work, having made the initial effort to tune into his individual wavelength, will find much to savour and to which to return. The album’s attractively packaged too, with a booklet containing helpful track notes and sporting Mikey’s own artwork and photography.