Releases > Releases April 2025

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TARA BREEN
Sooner or Later
Own Label, 12 Tracks, 51 Minutes www.tarabreen.com
It seems as though Tara Breen has been around for such a long time, it may come as a surprise that this is her debut solo album. On Sooner or Later she is joined by Dermot Sheedy (bodhrán & snare) and Seán Óg Graham (guitars, bouzouki, keys, bass), who recorded the work at his Bannview Studio. A tight crew playing tight tunes.
The first track, Pottinger’s / Rannie MacLellan’s / Bunker Hill, is the only selection you can hear on her Bandcamp page. Pottinger’s is a Shetland tune, and it sets us up for some delightful listening when we have the full album. Tara is from Clare and there’s a depth in the local repertoire, but her eclectic collation of fiddle music may be curating new tunes west of the Shannon.
Tara is in touch with what’s happening now in traditional music. She has the slip jig Tommy McElvogues learned from the recent Sanctuary album by Garadice. Another slip jig The Rumours of Dart was picked up from its composer Oisín McCauley when on tour in Texas in 2023.
There are tunes from James Scott Skinner, The Eureka and The Baker, a tune from  Cape Breton’s Kinnon Beaton (Good Boy Yourself). Seán Óg sets the beat with his choppy guitar riff for the set All My Friends/
Nutcracker/The Open Fence, the first tune by the Cape Breton fiddler Jerry Holland (RIP), the second by Joe Liddy and the last from the Scottish fiddling solicitor Ian Hardie, who passed away in 2012. Tara resurrects a tune found in her brother’s sheet music notes, The Corsican Waltz; it acts as the pivot point of the album. Tara composed a slow air for her friend Eamonn Nugent, who died in October 2024. There’s real sadness in the music, extended notes played as if trying to hold onto the last warm touch of kindness. Sean ÓG’s guitar, picks the melody, like a sombre Fado.
Tara ends the album with two Tommy Peoples tunes, Mary and Me/The Celebration. Tommy toured with Tara’s father in the 1970s and it was during this time her dad bought the fiddle she plays on Sooner or Later. That £100 spent back then, has grown with interest into Sooner or Later. This is an album paying big dividends, it’s a fiddler’s joy from start to finish.
Seán Laffey

DAMIEN MULLANE
Evoke
Own Label, 11 Tracks, 45 Minutes
www.damienmullane.bandcamp.com/album/evoke
I have been following Damien’s music ever since I saw him when he was a young teenager at the Return to Camden Town Festival. Back then he showed great promise and was obviously a wizard on the accordion, and he displayed an easygoing stage presence. All these qualities are evident in the grown up adult Mullane, and you’ll find them all on this album. It’s taken him thirteen years to finally bring out his second album, but he’s been in demand, touring for a time with DeDannan for example.
Damien appears on every track and is joined on each of those by Sean O’Meara  (acoustic and electric guitars and bass) and Conor Broderick on keyboards. Other musicians come, complementing Damien’s playing; they are Karen Hickey (fiddle), Emma McPhilemy (saxophone), Niamh Farrell (vocals), Michael Shimmin (percussion), Zoë Conway (violin and strings), Colin Farrell (fiddle) and six-year-old Eve Mullane on vocals. The song track closes the album, it is: If I Didn’t Mean You Well by Bill Withers.
A set of tunes kicks Evoke off, the most prominent being The Maid of Mount Kisco; his version is florid, rich in triplets and riven with electricity. The Trip to Sligo and the Tar Road to Sligo make great use of fractional pauses between the phrases; adding a dancer’s lift to this selection. Damien evinces the flavour of The Stranglers’ Golden Brown on a pair of waltzes: Lea’s Waltz / Take Back My Hand. Do check out his stringent chord playing on the accordion here as it sets the tunes in motion.
His accordion is at its most shimmering and lyrical on a pair of his original tunes: Damo’s Slip Jig/Damo’s Slip Jig (the other one) his playing here is exceptionally smooth. Whereas on the Seven Sisters he taps into a modern Celtic dance zeitgeist - this track wouldn’t be out of place on something as left field as anything by Mohsen Amini. Damien ventures south to Sliabh Luachra for the Polka set I’ll Buy Boots for Maggie, the way it merges into Cutting Fern and Moig Cross is a lesson in itself, with the piece ending on a delicious long-drawn note on the accordion. He goes to town on a certain Mr JS Bach’s Badinerie. Here it crumbles a confitured croissant and drinks strong coffee in a continental cafe caper.
The title track, Evoke, what a contrast, no fireworks here, just a tune to sink deep into your head, yes Damien knows how to craft an earworm melody. The album was produced by Damien, the strings arrangements are by Zoë Conway and the album was recorded and mixed by Donogh Hennessy at Studio Mhic An Daill, Dingle. As you can see by who is on board, it’s first class all the way when Evoke leaves the station.
Seán Laffey

FLOOK
Sanju
Flatfish Records 007CD, 5 Tracks, 30 Minutes www.flook.co.uk
A new release from this world class quartet is something to treasure. It’s been a good five years since their last album, Ancora. In the meantime, the four band members have been busy with projects foreign and domestic but have still come together for occasional tours and ad hoc performances. The same line-up has held steady since 1997, Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen on flutes, Ed Boyd on guitars, and the unshakeable John Joe Kelly on bodhrán. As well as celebrating 30 years since Flook’s formation in 1995, Sanju also marks a return to two-syllable album titles. At just thirty minutes, this recording is short by most standards, but as you’d expect it’s long on quality.
Fourteen tunes are packed into the five tracks here, reels, jigs, slower pieces, smooth and tasty. There’s perhaps nothing to make you spill your drink, nothing with the attack of John McSherry’s Quickenbeam or Gordon Duncan’s Pressed for Time on previous Flook albums, although Faqqua comes close, a driving reel with an oriental flavour. Most of the material on Sanju was written by Finnegan or Allen, and there’s a lovely Liz Carroll reel buried in a set of Brian’s tunes. Gentler pieces include the opening pair of dreamy rhythm-shifting melodies and a poignant lament for Koady Chaisson (the East Pointers banjo player who passed away in January 2022).
The final medley runs the gamut of tempos and timbres, from alto flute to Irish feadóg, a sound often emulated but rarely equalled. With fiddles from the wonderful Patsy Reid and other guests adding depth and variety on a few tracks, Sanju is pure class and distinctly Flook throughout.
Alex Monaghan

REG MEUROSS
Fire & Dust: A Woody Guthrie Story
Hatsong Records, 16 Tracks, 67 Minutes www.regmeuross.com
This is Reg Meuross’s third song cycle, this one was commissioned by Pete Townshend. Fire & Dust: The Woody Guthrie Story is described as “a journey into the heart and soul of one of America’s finest folk musicians”.
There are Woody Guthrie songs here to add context, they’ve become folk classics in their own right: So Long it’s Been Good To Know Ya; This Land Is Your Land; Ain’t Got No Home; and a co-write by Guthrie and Martin: Deportee, the latter’s message never more salient than it is now in 2025. How then does Meuross’ work stack up against America’s bard of the concerned left?
Firstly, this is a very polished album, it is not four chords and the truth on a battered guitar. It is musically intricate; that in itself doesn’t detract from the message, but it does massage it. Reg plays guitar, harmonica, banjo and he leads the vocals on every track. Other musicians include Phil Beer on mandolin, slide guitar, fiddle & backing vocals, Marion Fleetwood plays fiddle and Pete Townshend his trademark bass guitar.
Getting back to the message, what Meuross has produced here is a musical biography of Woody Guthrie, from his earliest exposure to music, to his political trajectory through the medium of song, highlighted on Woody Guthrie’s Chains and onwards to I Aint Dead, the realisation the struggle is never over. Woody Guthrie, a committed pacifist, joined the Merchant Marine in the second war and this phase of his life is told with a simple guitar backing on Stackabones and Runaway Boy.
The standout song on the album is Guthrie’s own dust bowl ballad So Long It’s Been Good to Know You, this is Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in under 4 minutes. Meuross gives us an insight into the mind of an undocumented illegal farm worker on Fit For Work, who says he’d like to retire at 50… if he makes it that far. Meuross is scratching us against the rusty gate post of the zeitgeist as America swings creaking to the right.
Woody Guthrie was a precursor to Seeger and Dylan, to the famous anti-establishment folk sessions in New York’s Washington Square, where Bernie Sanders once rocked up with his autoharp. Simple and direct was how the music was for Woody Guthrie, and who thought we’d ever see the need for those times to turn round again?
Meuross might have woken us up to a prophet who sang from an alternate hymn book…
Seán Laffey

LIZ OVERS
Nightjar
LO001CD, 12 Tracks, 39 Minutes www.lizovers.com
Liz Overs’ debut album Nightjar draws on nature and the elements; earth from Neill Mac Coll, Ben Nicholls and David Tomlins, fire from the spoken word with the Binnie Sisters, salt water from the Sussex shorelines and air from Overs herself.
With acoustic and electric guitars, autoharp, marxophone, bass, banjo and concertina among the instruments, the album, rooted in the female voice, explores the natural world with themes of  innocence, the complexities of childhood, mythology, fairies and moonlight, creating an atmospheric album that is genre-defying.
The title track Nightjar settles the mood: outdoors, rain, gentle percussion. Her poem Prayer to the Year with rhyming couplets, “black is the nightshade and the feast of a crow, eight is the secret that we’ll never know”, literary reference to L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between, the dangerous plant, metaphor for darkness, danger, juxtaposed with the glorious, illuminating colours; “copper the bracken sets the forest ablaze”, poetry with accompaniment and arrangements just right.
In Snow Moon, the first verse taken from Thomas Tusser, late 16th century chronicler of agrarian practise (why not), blended with the contemporary, “I talk with the moon and the moon knows my heart”, a child’s beautiful view of the world, recorded live, elegant, melodic.
Watchful child, watchful adult, an observer not just of nature but of people, objects, places, in Alleyways, “hearing his voice in old spice and tobacco”, “watching a ghost in the cracks of the ceiling”, ethereal, instruments layered.
Not shy of the bawdy song, Bad Girl, shows her versatility, the story of a young girl who “used to seek pleasure”, and “used to drink ale”, a poor girl who knows she’s done wrong.
The Binnie Sisters make a delightful appearance in a short, spoken word piece, combined with an innovative lilt.
Anne Marie Kennedy

WITHOUT WILLOW
Sink My Teeth
Own Label, Single, 4 Minutes www.withoutwillow.com
Without Willow hail from Donegal, and are a duo of singer-songwriters, Karen Kelly and Simon McCafferty. They’ve absorbed a myriad of influences, probably best summarised as acoustic folk with a healthy sprinkling of Americana, but their songs are deeply personal and performed with an obvious musical empathy which shines through their material. Their debut album Left Behind was released a year ago, receiving a lot of positive comment, and they’ve just issued a new single as a taster for more new recordings to come.
Sink My Teeth starts with acoustic guitars and the first impression is the absolute clarity of the instruments, until Karen’s voice kicks in. She’s immediately assured and in command; it’s reminiscent of the very best country and folk vocalists with lovely harmonies throughout from Simon. The song has real depth as well, relating the frustration of a troubled relationship where one person feels undermined and disrespected, but eventually stands up for herself.
The production is deliberately sparse, the guitar work is first-class with a sprinkling of tasty licks and a lovely instrumental break towards the end. Clearly, Without Willow have developed a deep musical bond, which has already produced some fine material, with the promise of much more to come.
Mark Lysaght

DAN SEALEY
Beware of Darkness
Own Label, 10 Tracks, 35 Minutes www.dansealey.com
Dan Sealey from Stratford came to fame as bassist with Ocean Colour Scene before returning to his folk roots in reforming Cosmotheka with his father Dave. In the 1970s the original Cosmotheka strode the twin fields of folk and ribald music hall and commanded a sizeable following as well as releasing several albums. Dan also founded Merrymouth with Simon Fowler, and somewhere in between joining Ocean Colour Scene, Sealey was singer and rhythm guitarist in Late, a four-piece indie/rock band from Astwood Bank, Redditch, Worcestershire, who were active between 1997 and 2001.
2012 saw Sealey and Ocean Colour Scene bandmate Fowler team up with multi-instrumentalist Mike McNamara to release a record, eventually called Simon Fowler’s Merrymouth, featuring guest appearances from John McCusker and Andy Cutting. Since 2014 the band has been known as Merrymouth, and now after all that activity in 2025 he finally releases his first completely solo album, Beware of Darkness. This features John McCusker on fiddles and whistles, Jack Blackman playing banjo and slide on Better Day, Rikki Hansel plays harmonica on People and Antonia Kirby supplies backing vocals on Better Day and Yesterday Came.
The album was recorded and self-produced in Dan’s own home studio, mixed and mastered by Baz Bayliss at Gospel Oak studio in Rowington where he bats with the local cricket team. The music on Beware of Darkness reflects the English contemporary folk-pop-rock crossovers similar to that of The Strawbs and Mumford and Sons, betimes as best found on opener Looking Inward and his melodic songwriting recalls that of Gerry Rafferty, Mike Scott and Dave Cousins at their best.
Beware of Darkness opens the door for Dan Sealey to create his own legend and it’s an impressive opening gambit for anyone with open ears to digest and enjoy.
John O’Regan

FILKIN’S DRIFT
Glan
Own Label, 10 Tracks, 41 Minutes www.filkinsmusic.com
Celtic music from Wales delivering an alternative take on guitar and fiddle playing. Shamefully, when I worked in Wales, the nearest I got to the native tongue was negotiating the traffic signs around Llantrisant. However, whether you are a native Welsh speaker or not, there is much to enjoy in this album from fiddler Seth Bye and guitarist Chris Roberts.
Given that most of the songs are in Welsh, the nuances of language may pass us by, yet the nuances of melody are freely open to us. I was fascinated by the beauty of fiddle playing, with its tendency to minor and modal registers, and marvelled at the understated guitar accompaniment. Wales, I said to myself, has found its Hayes and Cahill.
Seth Bye has a penchant for pizzicato on songs such as Hiraeth and Adar Man y Mynydd. It pays to research the songs that touch your heart, and one such was Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn (Shepherding the White Wheat); it’s well known in the Principality, it is a tragic tale. Wil Hopcyn fell in love with Ann Thomas, the daughter of a rich farmer near Maesteg. Wil was a thatcher and poet. Ann’s mother forbade the union and Ann married a local squire. Wil, broken hearted left Wales for the city of Bristol. Months later he returned and found Ann was dying, she was only 24. She passed away happy in Wil’s arms. The couple are buried together in Llangynwyd.
Filkin’s Drift create captivating vocal harmonies, enhanced by the duo’s ability to lay down essentially simple but deeply meaningful backing. Indeed this sophisticated simplicity brings a sensuous magic and charm to the album. Their final track is one we all know, sung in English, an a cappella version of the Irish song The Water is Wide.
The distance between us might get a tad shorter when you hear this album. As it says on the road signs: Croeso I Gymru; in Welsh or English, Filkin’s Drift are without doubt a talented and truly melodic duo.
Seán Laffey

KINNFOLK
Star Above the Mountain
Own Label, 10 Tracks, 39 Minutes www.kinnfolkmusic.com
Josh and Julie Kinn have expanded their Celtic music horizons on this album, co-opting a bunch of excellent players from Roanoke’s active session scene: Paul Brockman (fiddle), Brandon Davis (uilleann pipes, small pipes), Burt Mitchell (flute), Mitch Petersen (tin whistle), and Tim Sauls (banjo, bouzouki).
Still at the heart of the album is the chemistry between Josh on octave mandolin and Julie on bodhrán. They both sing, have strong resonant voices and harmonise beautifully together. You can judge their Celtic credentials on the song Highland Laddie; the words are as close to the Robert Burns’ version as possible and the combination of melody on mandolin and the deep bass of the bodhrán, brings out the martial essence of the story.
The concept album focusses its creative energy on new songs, putting Roanoke front and centre; this is an album about place. The Water’s Rising / Gwendal is a ballad about a flood in the town, played by the full ensemble. The band do a fine job on the title track, an instrumental dance tune anchored by Josh’s octave mandolin. Josh takes the vocal lead on Ghost of Old Crozet, with its banjo setting the song firmly in the Blue Ridge Mountain of Virginia. Old Gabriel takes us into the rusty industrial heartland, named after a factory whistle. Julie sings of the march of progress and the silence when the last whistle blew – it’s a sensitive song backed by Josh on the guitar.
Roanoke Puirt à Beul is a new song in Scots Gàidhlig, where Josh is singing the praises of the Appalachian landscape. Julie sings Song for The Valley, just her voice over a pulsing drone, adding atmosphere and the chance to ride the dynamics of the song.
They end the album with a highlight, two voices in perfect harmony, singing The Parting Glass, a universal Celtic favourite, and a touchstone of tradition from Roscommon to Roanoke.
Seán Laffey

WILL FINN and ROSIE CALVERT
Fallow Alchemy
Own Label, 14 Tracks, 56 Minutes www.willfinnandrosiecalvert.com
One anchor of English folk song is a cappella singing. Whether it be for harvesting corn, hooking spuds or turning a capstan, they even sing communal songs at their soccer matches. For a smaller scale than Anfield or the Emirates, there’s probably no better duo around today than Will Finn and Rosie Calvert, especially when it comes to creating beautiful sounds with just two voices.
The married couple have been singing since they were undergraduates on Newcastle University’s Folk and Traditional Music degree. A dive into YouTube will uncover an earlier rendition of Paddy’s Lamentation from 2016, they obviously have time as well as talent behind them.
The tracks here mix pure a cappella with some intriguing music, Rosie plays the steel pan and Will the ukulele and piano. At times they are joined by Adam Stapleford (drums, percussion), Bertie Armstrong (banjo), Nicola Beazley (fiddle, strings) and Pete Ord on guitar and bass; he was also in charge of the recording and mixing of the album.
Fallow Alchemy celebrates the quiet moments of the year, periods when nature steps back from the hurry of growth and reproduction and hibernates, recharges, readying itself for resurgence. As you’d expect, there are songs that are pastoral, Daddy Fox, The Bee-Boy’s Song, folksy Americana on Leather Wing Bat, and a reshuffle of As I Roved Out in The Trooper and the Maid. There is some cod-Gaelic in the repeated refrain of The Herring (a version was recorded in the field from Mikeen McCarthy by Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie in London in 1976). Its origins are in the 1830s. Another number is much later in date, Loudon Wainwright III’s 1973 Swimming Song.
Musically there’s a bold dichotomy here, from the purity of two voices in perfect harmony on Bamfield’s John Vanden or Mariah’s Gone, to acoustic accompaniment, with the steel pan very much to the fore on Swimming Song. Then there’s a shift to English folk rock on Ewan MacColl’s The Trawling Trade. The musicians play a set of waltzes, including the Morris Tune Oranges in Bloom. It’s not about Florida or Spain, it’s the name of a cider apple farm in Gloucestershire, I believe.
That then is a snapshot of Fallow Alchemy, a blend of voices, a blend of musics and traditions, where variety is always only one track away.
Seán Laffey