Irish songwriters are willing to reduce the Fiddle-feel-good sound and a few humorous homesick ballads. Can not serve Ben Reel from the County Armagh so. However, he presented on "Darkness And The Light" a highly appealing and catchy Americana sound that equally makes use of for Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Roy Orbison. It's about what just a songwriter haunts so: the fine line between light and darkness in life, sitting in the same boat, which is seemingly thrown about aimlessly in the sea of suffering. It requires little fancy word ballast, it satisfy some universal metaphors from the ship at sea, the promise of salvation train, on the one waits in vain from this little bit of light that is still burning in the most desperate contemporaries. And it is this suspense in life is, is the staple of these eleven wonderful songs - better yet: the 16 songs of the Special Edition. It starts with a mantra that soon makes but the inventory of space: "We're all half crazy, we're all half insane". Just Need a live favorite, a high song on love follows: "Fill Me Up" (Attention - only Special Edition available separately via I-Tunes!). Very wonderful is the simplest song in the set, which was originally planned as the theme song "Watershed". What's coming up that do not know you, but you'd expect a desperate protagonists of these songs that the tide turns soon. If this album need a hit, then it is certainly the empathetic-comforting "Heart Just Will not Heal", which sounds like an outtake from Springsteen's "Magic" album, and no worse. Of course thematic trips to Ireland. So is the portrait of an old drunkard who brings his money through the weekend with horse betting ("Before Your Time"), a depressing trip to the Irish province. He knows himself that it's too late, and came to the sobering conclusion: ". I love all my addictions, like to keep them near my side" Even more urgently the collaboration with the songwriter colleague Tony McLoughlin, "Our Father's Sins": to bring the trial, the world of the politically torn island with Celtic myths in line. And who needs' ran when it's too late? Of course, the great Roy: "You're Not Alone" is quite large Americana Theatre - Orbison, the pop music taught dreaming, and the attacks Ben Reel of course like to. Anyone who then did not want to believe, the need to precisely comply with the more modest wisdom: "The best did you get, is someone to talk to." And if they do not happen here? Then simply drop this very album on ...