Reviews

Best of Irish Music Network Tour: The Coach House, Dublin Castle

Siobhán Long

"Roots and Relations" is the theme of Music Network's winter Best Of Irish tour this year, and they could hardly have asked a better trio to fulfil the promise of the tour's title. Altan's Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Dermot Byrne have been basking in the delights of their own Donegal music for many years. Joined for this tour by Mairéad's nephew, fiddler Ciarán Ó Maonaigh, TG4's 2003 Young Musician Of The Year, they've chosen to celebrate their shared gene pool with a fair quantum of vim and vigour.

Kicking off with a fine pair of tunes borrowed from Con Cassidy, The Wedding Jig and Tá Do Mhargadh Déanta, Mairéad and Ciarán gloried in their duelling fiddles, Ciarán's long bow hand providing a seamless counter to Mairéad's shorter, feistier reading of the tunes, with barely a whisper of air passing between them.

Dermot Byrne is the quiet man of traditional music. After a decade on the road with Altan, tonight was the first chance most of us had to hear him speak on stage. Reluctantly introducing a highland and a reel of the same name, The Temple House, Byrne re-implanted himself in the belly of his instrument once the music started, handling his accordion with the precision and delicacy of a neurosurgeon, and jettisoning forever staid notions of it as a crude instrument, incapable of the most complex emotional maturity.

Mairéad's singing added a further velveteen layer to the night. Her strong Donegal accent colours and shades her song repertoire with a gentility that's all her own. Her final song choice, borrowed from the author, her father, Francie Mooney, was Gleanntán Glas Gaoth Dobhair, and it soared skywards, fuelled by her delicately decorative singing style.

This was a tour that showcased Ciarán Ó Maonaigh's emerging maturity as a fiddle player who juggles discipline and exuberance with occasional difficulty, but whose musical soul is undeniably rooted in his home place. It was a night, too, when audience and artists merged seamlessly. A final session saw them joined by fiddler Dermot McLaughlin and bodhrán player, Dave O'Donoghue. What remained in the pulse long after they left was a sense of the music infusing every corpuscle - of musicians and listeners alike.

Martin Finnin: Meanwhile . . . in a Foreign Land

Vangard Gallery, Cork

Mark Ewart

Now that the dust has settled following the opening festivities for Cork 2005 - European Capital of Culture, it's time to see what the city has to offer. But even before the first firework lit up the sky during the opening ceremony, some were predicting an even bigger bang, as the programme would collapse in on itself in a blaze of underachievement.

Well that eventuality is of course debatable, but if Martin Finnin's striking show at the Vangard is anything to go by, the festival directors and cultural movers and shakers need not worry.

Finnin has progressively made a name for himself in recent years picking up admirers and awards along the way. Certainly his work has matured over the past four or so years, but has crucially not lost any if its vital energy and raw confidence. First and foremost, we see this through his bold palette, which signs its name in riotous technicolour, as pigment is at times taken straight from the tube. But even within its irresistible intensity, Finnin's use of colour is never garish, as considered tonality and textural idiosyncrasies imbue a beguiling, almost intangible serenity that does battle with the bold expressiveness of the work.

Imagery is sparse throughout, with the naïve figures - a staple from early in his career - evermore the strangers in his abstracted landscapes. But this is not literal space, but more like an accumulation of sights, sounds and smells of an avid traveller (most recently in India) which become amalgamated in the artist's subconscious before being revealed in a tumult of creativity. Runs until January 29th

The Dears and Ambulance LTD

Whelans

Adrienne Murphy

Ambulance LTD, the band supporting The Dears tonight in Whelans' wonderfully dark interior, are a cute five-piece from New York City whose musical talent, looks and youth mark them out as major future players on the US indie music scene. Here's a band who love to mix styles, sounding Manchester one moment, alternative US country the next.

Like their support act, Canadian band The Dears make no effort to disguise their British indie influence. Most of the songs they play tonight are from last year's brilliantly cinematic No Cities Left, an extraordinarily varied album that incorporates avant-garde cabaret, indie, rock, punk and pop.

The six-piece is fronted by vocalist/ guitarist Murray A. Lightburn, whom the rest of the band seem to adore. True, Lightburn has the guru-like air of a tortured genius. He writes all the songs, and you can tell from their titles - Who Are You, Defenders Of The Universe?, Pinned Together, Falling Apart, The Death Of All The Romance, Postcard From Purgatory - that Lightburn's sensibilities are literary and apocalyptic as opposed to cheap and cheerful. His wide-ranging voice, set off brilliantly by female harmonies, seems to emerge from a place of despair, tapping into vast reservoirs of often dangerous emotion and traversing a landscape that is bleak yet redeemed in a Morrissey-black-humour kind of way.

You can't listen to The Dears without hearing groundbreakers such as Pink Floyd, The Smiths, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses, The Tindersticks and more. The variety is head-spinning, the influences admirable. But is the sound not just a little too derivative? While it's clear that The Dears are hugely talented, I look forward to the time when they find their own true voice.