David Holmes’ vital new album is worth the 15-year wait, while John Francis Flynn’s second album likely to get Choice nod

According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), he has 56 soundtrack credits for feature films and TV dramas, including, most recently, Neil Jordan’s poorly received Marlowe. He’s best known for his work on Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels.

Impressive as much of his soundtrack work is, it’s his own studio offerings where the real gold dust lies. His 2008 album, The Holy Pictures, was a superlative, genre-hopping song collection inspired by his parents and upbringing and now, 15 years later, he has followed it up with an evocative wonder, Blind on a Galloping Horse.

This time, he’s abetted by the singing of American singer and comparative newcomer Raven Violet, who happens to be his god-daughter. (Her parents, Keefus Ciancia and Jade Vincent, are Holmes’s collaborators in his side project, Unloved.) It’s a fruitful union. While most of the songs would have worked perfectly well as instrumentals, her spirited vocals elevate them.

A case in point is captured by lead single Necessary Genius. On a widescreen, pulse-quickening electronic backdrop, Violet celebrates many of the greatest names in art, people whose work has had a real impact on Holmes, an eclectic bunch including Terry Hall, Tony Wilson, Angela Davis and John Coltrane. The song is bookended by references to two Irish greats: Samuel Beckett and Sinéad O’Connor. The single artwork depicts O’Connor — Holmes was producing her album at the time of her death this summer. Necessary Genius’ message is straightforward: great art can provide succour in a world riven by division.​

Much of the album grapples with the wars and conflicts that have characterised the last few years. Ten-minute opener When People are Occupied Resistance is Justified is the most politicised track he has released, although it’s not overtly about the recent history of the land of his birth, a Catholic boy whose childhood spanned the Troubles horrors of 1970s and early 1980s knows exactly what a forceful occupation can mean. “Let’s do something about it,” Violet sings, “Or we’ll always live in pain”. Despite its length, the song sounds vital and urgent, an immensity of sound relentlessly moving forward.

At 75 minutes, this is an album that feels weighty and yet there’s little that one would opt to shed. A previously released song, It’s Over, If We Run Out of Love — which Holmes wrote with Noel Gallagher — has been given a startling resurrection.A super-sized anthem, it’s packed with sloganeering lyrics, a captivating Raven Violet vocal and a thrilling synthesis of synths and percussion.

Don’t be surprised to find it on the Choice Prize nomination list in the new year.

Another homegrown album that will likely get a Choice nod is Look Over the Wall, See the Sky, the second album from Dublin folk troubadour John Francis Flynn. Once again, he has teamed up with producer and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Jenkinson and the pair thoroughly reinvent old trad songs, both well known and otherwise. Within a Mile of Dublin — the reel made famous in the 1960s by the Dubliners — is a standout that builds into a thrilling wall of noise featuring the liveliest of whistles, clarinet, accordion, viola, double bass and drums. There are snatches of disembodied vocals too.

Kitty, whose best-known version appears on the Pogues’ debut album, is reimagined as a slow, hypnotic meditation built around fiddle, clarinet and percussion and much studio alchemy.

There are also covers of two Ewan MacColl songs, including Dirty Old Town. It takes considerable chutzpah to take on a song that has been rendered almost meaningless though overfamiliarity, but Flynn’s plaintive and raw interpretation deserves to be widely heard. Judiciously used trombone, French horn and trumpet augment the fresh approach.