Keenly detailed hymns of romance and regret from Ultan Conlon

Romance and regret weave through Ultan Conlon’s latest album Songs Of Love So Cruel, released in the U.S. this summer. It’s the second full-length release from the Galway-based singer-songwriter, following his 2009 debut Bless Your Heart, and the years between recordings seem to have been spent in rigorous examination of the end of a love affair; his songs are a 360 view of heartbreak, detailing all its attendant complications of hope, yearning, sorrow, bitterness, nostalgia and occasional magical thinking. There are lyrical gems to be mined among his plainspoken verse, from the scene-setter “It’s been such a long time since the screws came loose” on the opening “In The Mad” to the conundrum expressed in “Bristlecone Pines”:

Conlon’s vocal style has occasionally drawn comparisons to Roy Orbison, and his voice suits the tunes best when it dips low into that kind of dark-velvet croon, as on the gloomy blues-tinged rock of “Bristlecone Pines” or “Golden Sands,” with its vintage “Be My Baby” kick-drum thump. Classic pop references like that and the chorusing oohs on “Lonely Avenues” pepper the album’s jangly roots-rock. Most charming is the closing “When I Fell In Love With You,” an unadorned piece as gentle as a lullaby, with acoustic guitar plucked to sound like a slowly turning music box. It’s either a resolution or a heartfelt wish: “There is nothing left do except grow old together… there was something that I lost when I was a young boy/and I found it when I fell in love with you.”