Damhnait Doyle - Liquor Store Flowers, album review

Exposing the Shallow 

Shoot to Miss is a stand-out on this excellent collection of Country-esque songs, the hint of Emmylou in the vocal here that elsewhere has further individual strengths and tonal variations delivering lyrics with emotional gusto, as with So Clean

That’s something that Jesus wouldn’t do

I don’t know who's feeding this shit to you …

…Why do you wanna be so clean

When all the good hands are getting dirty

seeming a song about sham and duplicity, and it must be an attack on the political appropriation of righteous posture over actual and hypocritical practice: we know the sort. This is potent in a song as wrapped in the ordinary, if superb, musicality of a Country rock melody.

The title track deals in another kind of shallow gesturing, an incisive and intelligent expose of how pathetic another’s failure is – not one remedied by delivering those kind of cliched flowers.

Doyle wrote four of the eleven songs on the album and collaborated with friends on the rest. This is a collective and collection of fine writing and musicianship that sparkles as the familiar - with which we can identify - and made memorable in its honesty, lyrically and in the performance.

Check out the country blues of closer Had to Have Him, such gorgeous solo vocal and gospel tinged harmony, the wail of guitar joining the choir of lament.

An early listen, but I am already impressed.