For Love and Laughter

On their first album with new singer Mairead Phelan, Solas reassure us that Irish trad is by no means in a state of stasis. Opening with the graceful dash of the speedy ‘Eoin Bear’s Reel’, the album demonstrates that studio polish need not dim the spit of the session. For there’s a real sense of life and blood pulsing through the music here, with Mick McAuley’s fingerwork seeming to defy the laws of nature and Seamus Egan’s work on a shopful of instruments well up to his own high standards.
Phelan brings a charming wistfulness to Ricky Lee Jones’ ‘Sailor Song’, and there’s a brooding tension in The Dillards’ ‘There Is A Time’ and a lyric that echoes Pete Seeger’s ‘To Everything There Is A Season’. Winifred Horan’s instrumental ‘My Dreams Of You’ is a soundtrack lying in wait for its own movie, Canadian folkies The Duhks make their mark on the delightful folk rock of ‘Merry Go Round’, and the knockabout of ‘Vital Mental Medicine’. Solas have an uncanny instinct for blending the traditional and the modern so well that you can rarely see the join.