Strange Brew presents… Lisa O’Neill at Town Hall Theatre.

A raconteur in the truest sense of the word, O’Neill is a five-time BBC Folk Award nominee and her previous album Heard a Long Gone Song was named The Guardian’s 2019 Folk Album of the Year. Her adaptation of Bob Dylan’s All the Tired Horses soundtracked the final scene of epic TV drama Peaky Blinders. All of This Is Chance features orchestral masterpieces such as the ambitious and cinematic Old Note, and the title track which was inspired by the Monaghan writer Patrick Kavanagh’s epic poem, The Great Hunger, as well as stirring contemplations on nature, birds, berries, bees, and blood ring out over a clacking banjo throughout the album, dusting and devastating all those in its wake.

All Of This Is Chance takes O’Neill’s inimitable voice to greater heights, or depths, depending on which way you look at it. Throughout all eight songs on this album, it feels like she is writing in a constant state of wonderment. Not only a portrait of the artist in love with nature but one perplexed by the ever-expanding gulf between it and modern society. O’Neill sings across that divide while simultaneously digging deep into the land, eyes transfixed on a universe of colourful birds, and beyond them stargazing into the atomised constellations of outer space of which we ourselves are fragments.

Photo by Patrick Glennon