Latest releases reviewed

GAVIN WHELAN
Another Time
Tallaght Records
***
Tin whistle player and piper Gavin Whelan launches headlong into his second solo album with a pair of tune sets that rattle and hum towards a heady crescendo that hints at a frantic pirouetting towards oblivion. Thankfully, wisdom prevails, and Whelan lowers the temperature palpably with a throaty fiddle introduction from Zoë Conway on the reel set, The Mountain Lark. A textured backdrop of bouzouki and mandolin alongside Whelan's feisty piping on Paddy Mills are proof positive that he has more on his mind than a mere flexing of musical muscles. The jig set bookended by Joe Derrane's and The Homecoming (the latter composed by bouzouki player Eoin O'Neill) captures the agile flightiness of the whistle, amid a repertoire bursting at the seams with originality, vim and no small amount of vigour.
www.gavinwhelan.ie

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Classic Labour Songs
Smithsonian Folkways
****
A patchwork quilt of voices, an ordnance survey of worker's rights (and wrongs), this is a magnificent collage spanning the great and the good. Woody Guthrie, The Almanac Singers (and Pete Seeger) and the marvellously titled New Harmony Sisterhood Band tell tales of wage wars, union breaking and slave labour with a wry wit that wouldn't go astray in labour relations these days. Paul Robeson lends a foreboding reading of Joe Hill, an unlikely but able predecessor to Luke Kelly's version. Similarly, The Almanac Singers and Florence Reece offer two distinctive readings of Which Side Are You On?, hard evidence of how words and music mutate, sharing their oxygen with singers who temporarily take their possession. A delicious tincture of what folk music is all about. www.folkways.si.edu.
Siobhán Long