CD CHOICE: Abocurragh,Claddagh Records ****

It's been 11 years since Andy Irvine last released a solo album. Not that he's been idle: Patrick Street, Planxty and Mozaik have all triumphed on the back of his finely etched songs and layered mandola, guitar, bouzouki and harmonica. Abocurraghis a richly fermented reminder of the finesse Irvine wore so lightly, particularly with Planxty, whose ghost treads throughout this collection (albeit sans Christy Moore).

Liam O'Flynn and Dónal Lunny weave richly arranged skeins of light through Irvine's eclectic song choices, and Máirtín O'Connor adds the subtlest of patterns on box. Willie of Winsbury,revived from Irvine's days with Sweeney's Men, is a pitch-perfect reading of an epic saga laden with medieval drama (milk white steeds, prisoner kings, errant lovers, infinite riches). Irvine's ageless voice alights on every twist and turn of the tale with an agility that folk interpreters would do well to note.

Irvine inhabits these songs as if they were his own skin, with well- worn tales such as the opener, Three Huntsmen, cosying up alongside a quartet of his own compositions like long-lost pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Mozaik's Nikola Parov, Bruce Molsky and Rens van der Zalm add to Irvine's calculus-like rhythms, with Parov's nyckelharpa and kaval bringing belly-deep sighs to the syncopated The Demon Lover, and Molsky and van der Zalm lending fine Appalachian-flavoured fiddle to James Magee.

Amid such a bounteous collection (produced by polymath Dónal Lunny), there are a few weak links. Although the arrangements on The Close Shaveshimmy and slide on the back of Irvine, Lunny and O'Connor's lithe playing, lyrically it lurches through a tale predictable in its denouement and plodding in its wordsmithery. Oslo is equally rich musically, with Annebjørg Lien's hardanger fiddles conjuring a lost week in Norway, but it falters on the pedantic nature of its lyric.

Still, such Achilles' tendons are mere reminders of the luxuriance of the rest of this collection, with George Papavgeris's Emptyhandedan immaculate example of drum- tight songwriting, phrasing and arrangements. See andyirvine.com

Download tracks:Willie of Winsbury, Emptyhanded