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Title: Eleanor McEvoy – Snapshots (1999)
Genre: Folk Rock
Format: SACD ISO

Irish singer/songwriter Eleanor McEvoy returned with her third release, Snapshots, with ’80s fixture Rupert Hine (the Fixx) at the production helm and lending guitar, keyboard, percussion, and background vocal assistance. Musically, the tone is light and breezy with Julia Fordham and Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn being touchstones both vocally and lyrically. “All I Have,” co-written with Caroline Lavelle, chugs along nicely and “Wrapping Me Up in Luxury (Until the Morning Comes)” is an engaging midtempo shuffle about the comfort and security of being in love. The highlights are “Did You Tell Him?” which is dead-on in its literate description of the mixed emotions felt when a friend has bumped into a former lover, and the sax-driven “Please Heart, You’re Killing Me,” a jaunty track as inviting as a warm, summer day. McEvoy even spices things up with the dance beat of “Territory of Poets.” McEvoy is a talented and insightful writer with a pleasant voice that is capable of firepower, and Snapshots is an impressive display of her abilities.

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Title: Eleanor McEvoy – Yola (2001)
Genre: Celtic, New Age, Pop Rock
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Celtic pop singer/songwriter Eleanor McEvoy was born in Dublin on January 20, 1967, beginning piano lessons at age four; she took up the violin two years later, and as a teen joined the Junior Irish Youth Orchestra. Upon graduating college, McEvoy was tapped for the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, but after four years she quit to pursue a career as a pop performer; in 1992, her “Only a Woman’s Heart” highlighted the anthology A Woman’s Heart, which went on to become the best-selling album in Irish chart history.

Yola was Eleanor McEvoy’s follow-up to the lavishly produced pop record Snapshots, but the two records could hardly be farther apart in instrumentation. Recorded semi-live, set entirely in sparse piano-guitar-and-drum arrangements, and conceptually centered around McEvoy’s partnership with classically trained pianist Brian Connor, Yola seems to find its guiding principle in its final song, which celebrates “something so wonderful, something so pure.” The purity of the arrangements is indeed wonderful. McEvoy sings “Seasoned Love” in a piano-only performance that sounds like a number from a Stephen Sondheim musical, and goes a step sparser on “Isn’t It a Little Late?,” which is backed only by drums. But despite the vast change in instrumentation, very little separates McEvoy’s songwriting on Yola from her Snapshots work. Most of these songs could easily be padded with strings, electric guitar, and synthesizers and hold up well on the earlier album. The minimal settings on Yola demonstrate what so many other barebones efforts have shown: that good songs are still good when stripped to their essentials, that less is often more, and that complexity isn’t always an improvement. But then, neither is simplicity. Simple arrangements showcase an artist’s fundamental strengths — in McEvoy’s case, her beautifully and skillfully crafted melodies and evocative vocals — but they can also reveal an artist’s weaknesses. Snapshots seemed an attempt to cast McEvoy as a new Sarah McLachlan, but the former lacks the latter’s proficiency as a guitarist and intricacy of lyrical expression. McEvoy seems to write about only two subjects, lost love and found love, and she tends to rely on well-worn clichés like rain as a symbol for hardship and “me and you” as a central rhyme. Still, those weaknesses only contribute to the directness and purity of the recordings, and McEvoy’s melodies are easily strong enough to stand on their own.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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