Raucous, bawdy, reflective and wistful in turn, Macdara Yeates’s solo debut is a robust collection in which this Dublin singer revisits age-old tales and renders them anew with his own unforced imprint.
As a founder member of the Cobblestone singing session The Night Before Larry Got Stretched (as well as being a member of Skippers Alley), Yeates has a well-established pedigree in singing circles, but unlike his peers in Lankum, Landless and Ye Vagabonds, along with his erstwhile bandmates John Francis Flynn and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, he’s taken his own sweet time to let the songs gestate.
Yeates is possessed of a crystal-clear voice that contains echoes of the declamatory style of Luke Kelly and the emotional depth-charge of Liam Weldon, yet his full-bodied singing is never anything but his own. Light on decoration, Yeates favours a bareboned setting for most of his chosen songs, with many sung solo, and those that invite his own accompaniment on bodhrán and guitar are adorned with only the subtlest backdrop, reminiscent of the buoyant touch beloved of the late Dennis Cahill.
Yeates delights as much in the nonsense of his own version of The Herrin’ as he does in the poignant emigration song The Shores of Lough Bran (learned from the Connemara singer Sarah Ghriallais) and Dominic Behan’s Our Last Hope. Yeates’s colour palette is richly hued, thanks to the welcoming gabháil of his song book, where borrowings from Frank Harte, Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, Luke Kelly, Séamus Ennis and others coalesce to form a highly cohesive whole.
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In a golden age for traditional singing in Ireland, Yeates’s debut comes as a further welcome affirmation that the torch is being passed to a generation who truly understand and value its worth, while acknowledging that they are not afraid to inhabit it with their own particular voice. Traditional Singing from Dublin is a candid, clear-eyed and uncluttered snapshot from a singer who is finally stepping into the spotlight.
