Rattle&hum

Review 2005 / Music: Siobhan Long picks the best trad albums of the year

SLOW burners and fleeting fireballs. This year's CDs have managed to rattle and hum, to surprise and disappoint, though mercifully not all at the same time. While certainly no vintage year, there have been a handful of collections that remain close to the CD player long after the packaging has been recycled. Not only have they retained their freshness but, like the best music, they gradually reveal their charms over repeated listening.

Two Mancunian pipers released audacious solo albums. Martin Meehan's Three's Company was a debut that whispered of Miles Davis-like precision in its sinuous interpretation of piping tunes, a snapshot of a musician who's expended as much energy on pricking up his ears as he has on exercising his fingers across the pipes.

Michael McGoldrick yet again stilled the opposition with Wired, a sweeping, cinematic album that may not have always succeeded in what it was attempting to do, but somehow managed to re-shape the listener's expectation of the pipes by cross-cutting traditional, jazz-tinged and Indian folk music.

Liam Ó Maonlaoí finally emerged from the Hothouse Flowers chrysalis to deliver a deliciously ragged collection of sean nós songs on Rian. Altan's Ciaran Tourish was another who broke free from the band's clutches, albeit temporarily, releasing an unexpectedly eclectic collection of tunes and songs on Down the Line.

Sliabh Luachra box player Paudie O'Connor was one of the year's left-field surprises. His spare style gelled perfectly with an emotional fearlessness, which in debuts is a rare thing of beauty. American duo Randal Bays and Roger Landes took centre stage with not so much as a spotlight to surprise and delight with their fiddle and bouzouki duet, House to House. At a sufficient remove from the origins of the music they evidently love, Bays and Landes inhabited the tunes with a refreshing vigour, and their insistence on retaining the personality of the live recording, replete with foot taps and squeaky chairs, only added to the technicolour of the collection.

Chris Wood, England's closet renaissance man, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, may finally succumb to emerging from the bushel under which his light has hidden for way too long. Recently nominated in four categories in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, The Lark Descending is a starkly lit portrait of a musician standing full square in the folk tradition, harnessing its politics, mining its emotional depth and reinvigorating its repertoire for the time we live in.

Liz Carroll and John Doyle's sizzling collection, In Play, was another of the year's (belated) gems. Laden with highly original tunes from Carroll, the pair transform fiddle and guitar like nobody else, sharing a glorious fluency - and a healthy appetite for humour along the way.

Ultimately, though, it was the year of the singer, and Iarla Ó Lionáird's highly structured Invisible Fields was a butterfly poised for flight. Pen pictures of childhood innocence, and tales of emotional starvation populated Ó Lionáird's grand gesture of a recording, those nectared vocal cords shot through with just the right tincture of razor blade sharpness to keep the listener on tenterhooks from opening salvo to closing note.

PICK 2005

Iarla Ó Lionáird: Invisible Fields (Realworld)

Liz Carroll and John Doyle: In Play (Compass Records)

Randal Bayes and Roger Landes: House To House (Foxglove Records)

Chris Wood: The Lark Descending (Ruf Records)

Paudie O'Connor: Different State (Push Button Records)