Cosán Casta means ‘winding path’, an apt title for this collaboration between fiddle player Aoife Ní Bhriain and pianist Cormac McCarthy. Their musical wanderings have taken them in many directions – classical, jazz, avant-garde – and have now brought them back to Irish traditional music, influenced by what they’ve picked up on the way.
‘A Mháire’ begins with the fiddle alone (Ní Bhriain has a deep interest in J.S. Bach’s works for solo violin), then she bends notes like a piper – and it turns out it’s inspired by a slow air collected from a blind piper called O’Hannigan, a year before the Great Famine. Ní Bhriain’s and McCarthy’s beautiful piece is inflected by that coming tragedy. Sometimes McCarthy’s piano supports the fiddle. In ‘Butterfly’, chords become blooms…
Category: celtic
…CD release featuring 5 bonus tracks.
For nearly three decades, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys have brought a rowdy, beery, joyously disreputable form of Celtic punk to the masses. When they arrived on the national scene in the late ’90s, the Murphys were one of many extremely fun niche bands on Rancid’s Hellcat imprint. But the Murphys toured hard and made irresistible ragers, and they eventually transcended their background, finding their way to audiences far outside their subculture. In 2005, for instance, they set some unused archival Woody Guthrie words to stomping, ominous, irresistible music. A year later, Martin Scorsese used “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” the resulting song, in a couple of his scenes from his Oscar-winning Boston crime epic…
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Clannad’s 1985 album, Macalla (meaning “Echo” in Irish) and newly remastered by Phil Kinrade at Air Studios. This ninth studio album became their first international success and marked a significant point in the band’s career, showcasing a blend of their traditional Irish folk roots with a more mainstream, pop-influenced sound.
Building on the momentum from previous successes like “Theme from Harry’s Game” (1982), which gained international attention and was even used by U2 as concert outro music, and their award-winning soundtrack for the TV series “Robin of Sherwood” (released as the album Legend in 1984), Clannad was poised for a breakthrough in markets like America.
There’s a marked crossover from Celtic folk music at the moment. The Mary Wallopers now fill major rooms, while the likes of Lankum and Kingfishr edge the genre into the mainstream. Leading this charge are Brògeal, mixing the similarly imbued folk-punk of The Pogues and The Dubliners with indie-rock grandeur. Emerging during COVID, the band have since played pub basements up and down the country, packed festival stages, and nailed some high-profile support slots.
Each song layers vivid images of the pubs and streets of their home town of Falkirk (‘Vicar Street Days’), and its people (‘Draw the Line’), making the record an immersive scrapbook of vignettes. But beneath the frenzied tales of beer-soaked nights runs a remarkably delicate…
Primed by London Calling for the reluctant genre to open itself up to its place in the grand rock’n’roll lineage, the 1980s opened it up to folk traditions and fantastical lyricism, while punk opened up traditional music to the delight of slurred singing and unthinkable abrasions.
This was the time when Kathleen Brennan implored Tom Waits to dig a much deeper hole in Captain Beefheart’s quarry and Nick Cave to magnify the gothic elements of “Long Black Veil” and “Hey Joe” rather than the tunes. The richness of roughness was revitalizing tradition, and this trick still very much works; just check Lankum’s 2023 thrill-horror version of “Go Dig My Grave.” The rowdy speeds of traditional Irish folk and blistering punk proved to be indistinguishable from each…
It’s a real decision to do an album of tunes on the alto-violin, an instrument similar to the viola in size but played vertically, like a cello.
Fiddle player and composer Ultan O’Brien, who hails from the ‘wilds of County Clare in the West of Ireland’ has done just that with Dancing the Line and the lower notes of the alto breathe rustic life into these fourteen songs, six traditional and eight composed by Ultan.
An engaging artist with a keen interest in the improvisational side of Irish music, Ultan’s playing is muscular, with the growl of the alto-violin a point of difference. You can hear it straight off on ‘Iron Mountain Foothills’, an original piece (perhaps improvised?) that has echoes of a war lament and plays out with thick, metallic…