Live Report: Junior Brother hits a high note at Electric Picnic's Fishtown

Junior Brother presents one of the only circumstances in which hearing a dude cry “fuck yeah!” during a tin whistle solo doesn’t feel wildly out of place. As such, perhaps the biggest takeaway from watching him play last night was the complete physicality and punk stylings the Kerry songsmith brings to Irish trad music. Where else can you mosh to mandolin-inflected, six string-flooded drops?

Junior Brother’s – aka Ronan Kealy – set at Fishtown’s Jerry Fish Electric Sideshow is a good match. To see the singer-songwriter in the carnivalesque tent – dressed in velvet curtains and low-lit chandeliers – made for an incredible intersection of aesthetics and acoustics.

Even the most sagacious critics and listeners struggle to unpack the meticulous layers in Kealy’s music. In concert, the broad instrumental palette behind his forthcoming album The End – out 4th September – comes to life where every sonic tendon is flexed and amplified. The likes of new tunes ‘A Lot of Love’ and ‘Small Violence’ cut a unique blend of trad melodies and protean riffage.

Whereas Junior Brother’s previous releases take on a more sonically optimistic resplendence, there is some dark voltage coursing through these new tracks, which tackle masculinity, far-right extremism, mortality and the forces that work against nature – all filtered through the lens of Irish folklore.

Closing out the set is a standout performance ‘Welcome to My Mountain’, an eerie slip jig of trad surrealism that lurches across capricious time signatures and a hypnotic tin whistle flourish.

Junior Brother’s catalogue is sprawling and idiosyncratic, but nothing quite proves just how avant-garde and wholly unique he as an artist is than watching his live performances. And his ability to transcend genres comes to life tonight. Call it folk, punk, baroque indie, trad or some type of amalgamation of these labels — you still can’t pinpoint exactly what’s happening, but you know it’s unlike anything else out there right now.