The Lost Brothers
Halfway Towards A Healing (Bird Dog Records)
For ten years, Irish musicians/songwriters Oisin Leech and Mark McCausland have been on the fringes, a persistent if non-mainstream presence whose music is more under the radar than unappreciated. Across a series on inconspicuous albums – including this, their fifth – their music functions as a conduit to earlier pre-pop times. The Everly Brothers have always been a clear influence, and while that hasn’t drastically changed there’s little doubt that Halfway Towards A Healing has a more personal tone to it. There is also a scorched sensibility to the album that directly references its place of recording (Dust and Stone Studios, Tucson, Arizona) and its producer (Howe Gelb, as grizzled and a maverick a sound technician as you can imagine). Right on the money, however, are the lyrics, which run in parallel with the confidential, nimble temperaments of the best tracks. the likes of More Than I Can Comprehend and Nothing’s Going To Change Me Now are direct pleas from the heart, while the final track, The Ballad Of A Lost Brother, see Gelb deliver an impromptu spoken-word performance that echoes the album’s overriding sense of barely glimpsed hope. A beauty.
**** TCL
