Edinburgh’s Tradfest got off to an uproarious, indeed at times near riotous, start at The Queen’s Hall on Friday when the Dublin band Lankum generated a raw and irreverent energy that felt both contemporary yet rooted in folk tradition.
The quartet of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, Cormac Mac Diarmada and Radie Peat deliver keen, sonorous vocal harmonies over the instrumentation of Ian Lynch’s uilleann pipes, his brother’s guitar, Mac Diarmada’s fiddle, and Peat on harmonium, concertinas and whistles.
Some distracting badinage betwixt band and audience apart, they received an ecstatic reception. One or two items fell flat – a song about church abuses in Ireland proved a dolorous dirge that failed to project, while an instrumental Donegal version of The White Cockade either worked up a hypnotic, drone-heavy groove or simply seemed interminable... read the rest of the article here