Kila: Lemonade & Buns (Kila Music)
By Mic Moroney
Maybe trad ain't the rubric for this rogue's picnic of New Age revellers who've long gone the way of groove; jamming around with basic Irish tune-shapes as jazzy rhythm devices; with the odd noble uilleann pipe squawking from a shaggy thicket of sax, fiddles, flutes, some fine percussion, Lance Hogan's guitars and the cultural anomaly of Ronan O Snodaigh's hoarse, monotonal, as-Gaeilge savannah-rapping; with some trademark East European flavours completing the bong's pot pourri. The ragged rock'n'roll builds and fades, from a parched pan-Celtic cul de sac somewhere between Riverdance and the Afro-Celts, lack their earlier subtlety. Despite the energy, it's backwards they're going, receding into the molten haze of their own fusion.
Geraldine Cotter: Geraldine Cotter's Seinm an Piano/Play the Piano (Ossian Publications)
By Mic Moroney
An edifying little tutor (two cassettes, a book) which opens up the underworld of the trad piano, a major weapon in the ceili band armoury. Cotter has great steely rigour behind the soft accent, as in timeless trad-tutor tradition, she "first plays the tune slowly, and then up to speed" - in other words daintily spelt out, then ripped into with blur-fingered embellishments that leave you dangle-jawed. She daisy-trips through polkas, jigs and hop jigs, reels and hornpipes; ornament and "vamping" (left-hand chord-bouncing) in various tempi; the left hand neatly defining the camber of the tune, letting the right hand abscond with the fairies. A new lease of life for th'ould upright in the corner.