The Irish Times writers look at what is going on in the arts.
Steve Earle
Vicar Street, Dublin
Listening to Steve Earle is a little like finding a favourite coat you forgot you had. His voice is immediately familiar, warm and weary; cracked as old leather, it's the perfect fit for his music and lyrics. When you put on Steve Earle, you sometimes wondered why you ever bothered with any other country.
Earle, however, could never be accused of standing still. He may have cut his teeth in Nashville, learned from the great and the good of country, and his debut, Guitar Town, remains one of the essential country albums.
But more recently he has opened up his music to more rock, folk and ethnic elements, with his lyrics remaining rooted in the soil, elegant stories of the everyday in America, the Middle East and further afield.
Tonight, he's mainly solo, joined occasionally by his wife, Allison Moorer, and one person with a sampler and decks. The tracks with Moorer reveal a comfort and a softness that is uncommon in Earle's music; Moorer's gorgeous, resonant voice, big as a cathedral, does no harm either.
However, it's mainly for those hardcore travelling troubadour tracks that Earle fans come to see him live, and the songs come thick and fast. Steve's Last Ramble is followed by Devil's Right Hand. A humming, all too brief version of My Old Friend the Blues is followed by the rousing choruses of Some Day, and even without the backing band, the songs walk tall and strong.
Earle then launches into material from his latest album, Washington Square Serenade, playing and singing over syncopated beats and loops. It's an odd, disconcerting fit, that works best where the beats are simple, adding meat to Earle's rangy, raked voice and guitar.
On City of Immigrants, Middle Eastern percussive flourishes add a fine depth to the mix, but on other tracks it never really amounts to more than the sum of a full band. Sampled beats are well and good, but a guitar man can't interact with a drum machine and it feels constrictive and a little stilted.
Earle works best on his own on this night. Many's the man that can play the mandolin for Galway Girl better than Earle, but there's not a man that could sing it and make you believe it more.
A few rousing political sermons are par for the course, though he's reluctant to back his presidential horse just yet; an eloquent intro about losing his father and the importance of family sets the emotional ball rolling for the night's closing tracks.
When those tracks are Copperhead Road, the mighty Jerusalem and the classic Guitar Town, there's no resisting. A stunning solo performance from a master of his craft
Laurence Mackin
Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Catherine McEvoy and Micheál Ó Raghallaigh
The Coach House, Dublin Castle
Flight: that's what this music does. Taking flight, never fighting it. Finding just the air currents to suit their mood and tempo, fiddle, flute and concertina take to the air with the quiet confidence of travellers well versed in the vicissitudes of life's unpredictable undercurrents.
On a tour billed as 'Horsehair, Wind and Reeds', Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh led this merry trio on a fleet-footed foray through vast meadows, indeed prairies of tunes, his fiddle often leading, sometimes following, and occasionally refraining from joining the melee.
He's an experimentalist whose feet are firmly rooted in a deep love of tradition, and so his utter reinvention of Peadar Ó Riada's An Draighean was a revelation of both restraint and innovation, eking and stretching the core of the tune to fleetingly reveal its delicate underbelly, as if it were a Turner painting peeping out from under its layered protection into the weak light of January.
Catherine McEvoy's gorgeously rhythmic flute style was the ideal counter to Ó Raghallaigh's fiddle, and Micheál Ó Raghallaigh's concertina brought a magnificently deep and throaty quality to the tunes.
Amid countless nameless tunes that featured slides, reels and a lovely version of O'Sullivan's March (borrowed from Breanndán Begley's knapsack), the three ebbed and flowed, shimmied and slid through a repertoire that reeked of an experiment rapidly fermenting into something special.
McEvoy's choice of the slow air, Sliabh Geal gCua na Féile was the perfect base from which to bend and embellish notes, her phrasing indelibly rooted in a Sligo style, yet refreshingly free of any hint of predictability.
Micheál Ó Raghallaigh embarked on a lengthy solo that navigated its way through a lovely four-part version of the jig, Apples In Winter, as well as The Humours Of Ballyconnell, before abruptly coming to a halt due to an unexpected technical difficulty with his concertina.
His playing is ever inventive and lithe, although this solo set stretched just a tune too long and antennae were flagging by the time it ground to a premature stop.
As a snapshot of Music Network's Musicwide strand of work, this trio of musicians were the ideal showcase: individually accomplished and collectively hugely engaged, they seemed to revel in the chance to test and taste of one another's music.
With further nights on tour, there's a suspicion that their set list would continue to evolve as they wend their way across the country.
Tours until tomorrow
Siobhán Long
Flesh Dense
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast
Small-town Ireland and all is not as it seems. In the dark recesses behind the front doors of apparently ordinary semi-detached houses, their inhabitants are conspirators in a whole host of dirty little secrets.
Among the strange goings-on are illicit gay affairs, child imprisonment, terror tactics, bribery and corruption, all of it centred on the local obsession with, of all things, dance.
So desperate are Jacinta O'Reilly (Julie Maxwell) and Biddy (Rosie McClelland), her hirsute partner in crime, to get their name onto the Regional Amateur Dance Champion trophy that they will stop at virtually nothing to nobble the efforts of their rival hoofers.
What starts as the odd spot of professional espionage develops into an obsession with amputation and blood-letting of Shakespearean proportions.
And while Jacinta's son Peter (Padraig Wallace) strives to convince the unwilling Fintan (Stephen Beggs) that he is not the only gay in the village, others start to wonder why they have not seen Biddy's pretty daughter Assumpta (Karen Hassen) for a very long time.
Writer-director Patrick J O'Reilly's surreal, intensely physical black comedy for his Red Lemon company deftly hits the spot with the sell-out young audience.
His cast back him to the hilt, perhaps a tad too earnestly at times, but nobody can deny the pop-eyed hilarity of Maxwell's gruesome Jacinta, Begg's grimacing Fintan nor Padraig Wallace's muscularly mincing Peter. Slick, snappy and completely mad, the whole affair is satisfyingly subversive fun.
Until tomorrow
Jane Coyle
