artist news - mary black
Simply Spellbinding
--The Boston Globe
...Mary Black is the finest singer in Irish pop music.
Black is set to conquer a new world.
--Rolling Stone
...it's only time that separates her from international stardom. Black has a voice to die for.
--New York Post
DUBLIN - Within the Irish music industry, singer Mary Black is seen as a firm favorite to join the heavy-hitting ranks of such domestic artists as Enya, Sinead O'Connor, and Clannad's Maire Brennan in the international marketplace.
--Billboard
One tends to be suspicious of music with too immediate an appeal. Instant attraction often leads to boredom. With Mary Black's music, however, the opposite applies. Repeated listenings, instead of lessening the appeal of her previous release, By The Time It Gets Dark, have shown it to be one of the finest albums ever produced in Ireland.
--Hot Press, Dublin
...Black embodies the spirit of Dublin in the sense that her talent is steeped in ancient (yet street-wise) tradition coupled with a gnawing need to be progressive and visionary - a simultaneous glance at antiquity and timeless modernity, if you will...In my opinion, if Joyce and Yeats were alive today they'd be drinking to Mary Black.
--The Gavin Report
Mary Black Won't Be A Secret for Long
...people inevitably find out about a talent this resonant....she connected emotionally with her material practically on a molecular level. She is a staggering talent, a breathtaking vocalist who hardly fits any conventional mold...
For a vocalist to carry this much weight in a two-hour performance, the quality of her voice has to be close to spell-binding, her delivery flawless. Black qualified on both counts. She lit into the material with surgical precision. Slicing off syllables with a scalpel of a voice, cutting her way to the emotional heart of the songs...
The material ranged from the frolicsome "Once In A Very Blue Moon" [from By The Time It Gets Dark]... to "Columbus" [from No Frontiers], a historical epic and modern sea chanty in which she touched depths of feelings the lyrics alone cannot explain.
...most of Black's material is a deeply personal synthesis of pop and folk styles, where she inhabits a territory of her own making...
She can effortlessly evoke an aura of the Irish character, from numbers such as "Schooldays Over" [from By The Time It Gets Dark], about children going to work in the mines, to "Ellis Island" [from Without The Fanfare]...
Her "Song For Ireland" [from Collected] was rich with specific images...While Black struggles for recognition in this land of MTV and the Hot 100, she should never lose sight of the very qualities that make her the special performer and artist she is. Ultimately it is her individual gifts and highly personal approach that will win her the crowds she seeks...
--San Francisco Chronicle
It is always a long road for the true believers - and Black is definitely a believer following her own path.
