Album number eight and Crowley’s fourth for Chemikal Underground, Dark Eyed Messenger comprises 11 songs that alight on the various branches of the song tree the Irish singer / composer / songwriter has established and nurtured between his debut, A Strange Kind, in 1999 and his last release, the ravishing Some Blue Morning, in 2014. While crowned as ever with Crowley’s mahoganied baritone, Dark Eyed Messenger is the Dublin-based artist’s first set untouched by the instrument with which he is most associated, guitar. This is just one of many surprising yet bewitching results of the album’s stress-free birth at the hands of American producer and musician Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman (Sufjan Stevens, Martha Wainwright, The Magnetic Fields). Evoking fragments of such diverse works as A Walk Across The Rooftops by The Blue Nile and Deserter’s Songs by Mercury Rev, Dark Eyed Messenger sounds like it took ten times as long to make as it did, an illusion that is testament to the strength of the partnership that forged it. The singer outlines how their modus operandi evolved after he first arrived at Bartlett’s studio on West 37th Street after walking from his cousin’s apartment on the Upper East Side.
