This time too,gently & good melody ! many my friends loves this album !!

Paul Tiernan / earthquakes start with little cracks / right stuff records 2008 On first hearing, Paul Tiernan’s first collection of songs since 2004’s extraordinary Belle finds him in deceptively quietist mood: some might say ‘minimalist’, in keeping with the album’s title. However, ‘minimalist’ doesn’t mean ‘laid back’. At around 35 minutes this isn’t Tiernan’s longest album, but as these ten songs unfold it will become increasingly clear that Earthquakes is, as they say, a ‘grower’, full of ideas and musical invention, and an album in which restraint is often matched by subtly understated swagger: the misleadingly titled Panic Blues, with its spacey Nordic jazz cadences and drums are merely one splendid example. One of Tiernan’s greatest strengths as a lyricist has always been the clarity he applies to the creation of songs of personal regret tinged with nostalgia, often peopled with all-too naturalistic characters. Earthquakes is no different in this respect, being home to Frank, the anti-hero of Breakfast in Bed’s reverie, an alternative to Disney Girls any day, and to Jimmy, dead ringer for a hapless Coen brothers invention, who ‘always gets the words wrong.’ So many of Tiernan’s songs have examined these tongue-tied traits, the inexplicable misconstructions of human error and folly, and the echoes of the long-gone and the newly-past, and he does so in Earthquakes more intently than ever. Triumphs such as Those Regrets balance narrative and the ever-present with more than his customary awareness: he’s talking to you, and the weary anxiety in the lyrical abstraction of Old Dog will gnaw a chord in anyone’s experience. Tiernan’s audiences will already be familiar with his virtuosity as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger, alone, and with Interference, and the subtleties of Earthquakes are more than equal to anything he has created since the millennium. The familiar trademarks are all present: that voice, the slide guitar, the strings and plangent minor harmonies, overdubbed or played by a band as tight as any Tiernan has fronted since the start of his solo career. Comparisons are there for the making, but frankly, they’re invidious: in any language Earthquakes is as fine an album as you’ll hear this or any other year, and absolutely worthy of investigation.