Badhands: Far Away – Touching songs of love, loss and emotional flux

In addition to releasing a debut album entitled Predictable Boy under the Badhands moniker in 2018, Dubliner Daniel Fitzpatrick is a prolific and award-winning composer of music for wildlife documentaries. This highly accomplished songwriter also frequently collaborates with theatre companies and contemporary musicians, such as alt-crooner extraordinaire Paddy Hanna.

His second album, Far Away, refines a wonderfully rich sound inspired by mid-period Scott Walker and blue-chip legends and luminaries such as Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Lee Hazlewood. Perhaps this is the third Badhands long-playing record if you count his award-winning 2019 opus, Music from Wild Cuba: A Caribbean Journey, which won awards in Germany and the United States.

Recorded primarily at Ailfionn Studios in Fairview with musicians Chris Barry, Tom Cosgrave, Aoife Ruth, Ken Mooney and David Tapley, Far Away opens with the recent single When I Think About You, a song in the spirit of one of Cave's rousing romantic ballads channelled by Hazlewood. Another single, Wasted, follows, which is a terrific exercise in songwriting and infectiously catchy pop harmonics.

First One of the Day addresses the vice-like grip of alcoholism while Take Me Far Away concludes this nine-track collection on a suitably titled high. Whatever Fitzpatrick sonically fashions, from documentary soundtracks to these touching songs of love, loss and emotional flux, is well worthy of more attentive and appreciative ears.