Marc O' Reilly - My Friend Marx

by Benjamin Howarth

published: 2 / 4 / 2012

Label: Salt and Shake Records
Format: CD

Promising, but toned down debut album from blues-influenced Irish-born singer-songwriter and guitarist Marc O' Reilly, whose real talent lies as a stage act

Review

I first encountered Marc O’Reilly as an opening act at the Half Moon in Putney. On taking the stage, there were only five people in the room, two of whom were in the headline band. The rest of the audience were still mingling in the pub’s main bar. O’Reilly shuffled onto the stage, mumbled his name into the microphone and shyly tuned up his guitar. Anyone who goes to gigs regularly will have seen countless singer-songwriters. Some are good, some average, but with so many people doing something so similar, it is rare for any to really get the ears twitching. Marc O’Reilly does. He tears into his songs, with a huge rasping voice that bears easy comparison with Ray Lamontange or Gomez’s Ben Ottewell, and accompanies his voice with furious blues licks, hammered out of his acoustic guitar. O’Reilly softens his sound a bit on his debut album, which is – his guitar is noticeably toned down, and a broader palette comes from additional accompaniment added by friends and family. You get the best taste of what his live show is like on ‘Tell Old Joe’, a howling blues number, where Reilly pounds his guitar strings furiously, but for the most part ‘My Friend Marx’ is a more delicate offering than he provides on stage. Signs of real promise come on ‘Family Reunion’, a lilting ballad, embellished with a horn part. Only two minutes long, it has the album’s best arrangement and most instantly hummable tune. Another highlight is ‘La Question’, which channels Jose Gonzales’ rhymthic fingerpicking guitar style alongside a loose melody that could have come from mid-period Van Morrison. Alongside these, we find a truly excellent instrumental, ‘An African Day’, where O’Reilly shows off his dextrous guitar work. You suspect that the album where O’Reilly captures his live energy on record will be an improvement on this debut, but judged on its own merits, ‘My Friend Marx’ is easy to love.

Track Listing:-

1 My Friend Marx
2 The Scottish Widow
3 Hail
4 Lord of War
5 La Question
6 Narrow Street
7 Tell Old Joe
8 Family Reunion
9 Get Back
10 20 Minutes for 2 Years
11 An African Day
12 F.O.O.