Maggie Davey
CD OFTHEWEEK
Whisper to the Wild Water (Universal) has enough harmony, harps and harpsichords to ensure Maire Brennan’s safe passage to heaven.
Maire Brennan is from the magnificently talented Brennan family from Donegal, Ireland, who went on to form Clannad, a band which arguably produced their finest work before they became famous. Their early albums, Dulaman (1976) and In Concert (1978), together with albums from bands like Planxty and singers like Paul Brady, started a popular revival in Irish traditional music. U2, the Cranberries and Sinead O’Connor reaped the rewards of this revival in the Eighties and Nineties when Irish music in all its forms became the flavour of the early part of the decade.
Maire’s younger sister, Eithne, dropped out of the group in the early Eighties before the band became a huge success. Eithne had her day though in 1988, when, now known as Enya, her album Watermark sold over four million copies. All of which, and given the talent that Maire Brennan brims with, makes it difficult to listen to this album without wondering why it was ever made.
It is primarily an album made for the growing Christian music market. It nods in the direction of a great tradition of Irish-Christian and pre-Christian choral singing, but Brennan would have been better off recording some of the old hymns and saving herself the trouble of composing these lukewarm, breathless dirges. An exception is the Irish-language rendition of Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that is hard to harm at the best of times.