De Danann: Welcome to Hotel Connemara (Hummingbird Records)
You'll find it very hard to stifle a battered grin at the boys, doing instrumental covers of gentle pop classics: When a Man Loves a Woman, Parisienne, A Whiter Shade of Pale, The Sally Garden joined on to Clapton's Lay Down Sally, or the passionate, rousing tragi-hilarity of Bohemian Rhapsody. They're layered, and quite beautiful, check out Eleanor Rigby as an Irish dance tune - they won my heart, and I found myself grooving foolishly to You've Lost that Loving Feeling. Ah yeah, the greatest wedding band in the world, without exception.
- Mic Moroney
String Company: String Company (Independent)
God, I hope I chance into a cram-session in Tigh Neachtain in Galway soon to hear this quartet at their eclectic mix of Scandinavian, klezmer, gypsy or even Shetland tunes, a deep, weathered Ur-groove to their fiddle dirge-drones, beautiful uplifting harmonies and skipping rhythms. They are Werther Gladh (fiddle); Michael Chang (violin/viola), Nicola Geddes (cello) and Harry Donaldson guitar. Apart from the harsh, haunting Swedish slow air, Vismelodi, they put a brave hop to Eklunda Polska, Norwegian reinlender dances, Finnish humpas and tango tunes (!), or dreamy klezmer tunes like Andy Statman's Flatbush Waltz, somehow familiar to my ear, or Giora Fiedman's. Seriously, crack a listen to this. We don't know what wealth is in our midst.
- Mic Moroney
Mary MacNamara: The Blackberry Blossom (Ceirnini Cladaigh)
Peadar O Riada prefaces this East Clare concertina-player as one of the few artists playing genuine Irish traditional music, as if this was something you'd unconsciously do whilst wetting the tae, or sitting down. But while MacNamara comes from a very musical family (Tony MacMahon is her uncle), her concertina voice is her own, with a lovely relaxed toe-tap off it; lots of nimble, jiggering squirts of emphasis, often setting the tunes low down on the fatter reeds. She duets occasionally, as on the tune Brendan Begley calls The Hair Fell Off My Coconut, So How Do You Like It Baldy? But even alone, she has a lovely, involved way of coaxing out a tune.
- Mic Moroney
