Chris Murphy - The Tinker's Dream by Chris Murphy Violin

Chris Murphy’s “Connemara Ponies” gallops to the warm smack of a bodhran drum—here played by Celtic Woman’s Andy Reilly—while the flutes and violins echo the buzzing of bugs and birds in a long-ago dream of old Ireland. But while Uilleann pipes usher in the stirring “Union of the Seven Brothers,” marshalling an insistent rhythm that certainly pays homage to traditionalists like the Chieftains, elsewhere Murphy’s impressive ensemble suggests the Pogues’ more acoustic moments, and the roll-neck romance of Sixties folk-rockers like Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band.

And while “Gibraltar 1988” might signal a journey to points south, it’s a sea voyage to that mighty crag that only an Irishman (in Murphy’s case, Bronx Irish) could muster, pointing his violin bow toward dramatic waves of rolling acoustic guitar, droning double-bass—courtesy of the Waterboys’ Trevor Hutchenson—and sea-worthy penny whistles. Displaying at turns a brooding gravitas, at others a free-flowing heartfulness, Murphy’s Tinker’s Dream is a myth in the making, an imaginary soundtrack as at ease in a Tolkien landscape as at a South Boston watering hole, or wherever Irish ears are smiling.

Contains tracks

• Connemara Ponies by Chris Murphy Violin
• The Tinkers Dream by Chris Murphy Violin
• The Tower by Chris Murphy Violin