Multi-platinum, award-winning accordion player
Sharon Shannon has never been one to confine herself solely to tradition. The Galway-born virtuoso’s eponymous 1991 debut may be the best-selling album of traditional music ever released in her native Ireland, but it’s her enormous adaptability to almost every other style of music that keeps seats filled across the globe. On Saints & Scoundrels, her first new collection of studio material since 2007’s
Renegade,
Shannon and her top-notch band managed to incorporate R&B, country, and Cajun into the contemporary celtic pot, and recruited a typically eclectic cast of collaborators, including
Imelda May, Cartoon Thieves, Jerry Fish, Carol Keogh,
Justin Adams, and head
Pogue Shane MacGowan, the latter of whom provides a spirited, if none too eloquent rendition of his own "Rake at the Gates of Hell" paired with an instrumental
Shannon originally called "The Scoundrel’s Halo." To top it all off,
Shannon reunited with the original, 1989 version of the
Waterboys (she spent over a year with the band and contributed mightily to the excellent
Room to Roam album) on the delightful "Saints and Angels," a
Mike Scott-penned tune originally intended for inclusion on the band’s landmark 1989 record,
Fisherman’s Blues. ~ James Christopher Monger