The “deep well” is often a site of struggle, a source or a reflective pool; on Brigid Mae Power’s fourth record it is a place of reckoning, restitching and resuscitation. Folding in David Allred, Hamilton Belk, Peter Broderick, Conor O’Brien and Daniel O’Sullivan at different turns, the record was recorded mostly live to tape, and conveys a warm wisdom.

The spindly eeriness of I Know Who Is Sick (a traditional song popularised by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem) is gorgeously discomfiting, and there is clear-eyed tenderness on Counting Down as she wryly sings, “I’m considering a new career, but all I can do is play music by ear.”

Maybe It’s Just Lightning is a rich, bluesy treatise on the ways women often selflessly support, and her cover of Tim Buckley’s I Must Have Been Blind is beautiful, with lone flugelhorn amplifying its stark wistfulness. The Waterford Song is a psych-folk gem, referencing her grandfather and his relationship to nature. Some Life You’ve Known is a wheezy classic, a keening lullaby anchored by accordion.

[ Selk: Shed the Skin – colourful, weird and engagingOpens in new window ]

Power manages to make sadness transformative and redemptive, with the title song an almost avant-garde take on this theme. I Don’t Know Your Story, with its use of field recording, is another standout, with Down By the Glenside breathing new life into old tradition. This is vital, intelligent and dreamy music: alchemical brilliance.