Mick Hanly: Wooden Horses (MAD Records)
There is a rugged honesty about Mick Hanly's work which cuts through fashion and froth, and perhaps producer P.J. Curtis sought to tap into this natural vein when he decided to record this latest collection in his Clare home. Hanly's intimate country-folk is classic fireside music; the gentle moral tale of the title track, or the more pointed social comment of Mrs O'Neill, contrast well with the vulnerability of Once Was Enough or the lighter Light of My Life. The setting is simple: delicately picked guitar and rich, unaffected voice occasionally augmented by understated fiddle, mandolin and accordion. Low-key, lo-fi Irish folk it may be, but as the album's real gem, the intense If This Be Love, shows, Hanly remains a distinctive and important voice and one worthy of wider recognition.
- Joe Breen
Slaid Cleaves: Broke Down (Philo Records)
A name to remember. Slaid Cleaves was born and raised in Maine, college educated in University College, Cork and now lives in Austin, Texas. Though there are hints of his Irish sojourn in the 1980s, this singer/ songwriter draws on a range of country-folk influences for his captivating, colourful but deceptively easy-paced stories of hard life and hard times among the also-rans. Though the echoes are many - from Lucinda Williams and Steve Forbert to Guthrie and Dylan - Cleaves stamps his mark on the 10 tracks, whether it be the reluctant hope of One Good Year, the grim resignation of Cold and Lonely or the fighting fatalism of Bring It On. The playing is assured, the tunes luminous, the singing confident; seek him out, for he surely is a name to remember.
- Joe Breen
The London Lasses and Pete Quinn (Lo La Records)
With Quinn's O Suilleabhain-tinged ceili-vamping piano, the rattling applecart of this trad grrrl band from the fifth province of London catches up on you betimes: the fast internal beat, the ragged unison built up voice upon voice, with a fair ould punch to it. Bernie Conneely's banjo underpins fiddlers Elaine Conwell and Karen Ryan (also whistles) and Sharon Welton's flute, while Sue Cullen's voice gets atavistic power into the May Morning Dew. For all the fact that they're cousins, the accents are hard to tie down, with individual skills subsumed into the straight-ahead sessions. It's like McGowan, I suppose, lashing into the old culture with nothing at all to be ashamed of.
- Mic Moroney
Kevin Rowsome (and family): The Rowsome Tradition: Five Generations of Uileann Piping
Alongside recordings of his male near-ancestors from the otherworld of the late 1950s, the modern Rowsome has an earnest, aisily swaggering style born of total co-ordination. Each set is a technical study, wandering down, say, an Ennis byroad with barping regulators on a hornpipe; always with that emphatic little upskip I associate with Liam O'Flynn (indeed, O'Flynn's pipes were made by the grandfather). He breaks for the ditches more on reels like The Broken Pledge, neatly sideskips the ould beat of a jig, and is forever adding in the odd unprovoked squoozh of ornament. Yeah, if it's pipes you're after, this steady stream of nuggets is a real pleasure.
- Mic Moroney