Altan

Altan is a six-piece, traditional Irish band with nine albums under its belt, so it’s reasonable to expect technical excellence from the group’s material. What’s wonderfully surprising about this album is that Altan also delivers the unexpected with every cut. The opening song, an ancient ballad about a 24-year-old woman married to a 14-year-old boy, begins as a complaint about a badly arranged marriage, but the real poignancy of the song emerges when the bride loses her lover at the age of sixteen. Such odd relationships and morbid streaks are common in folk music, but singer Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, herself the widow of one of the band’s founding members, delivers the song without a hint of emotional distance. On “The Pretty Young Girl,” Dolly Parton’s guest vocal beautifully meshes with Ni Mhaonaigh’s voice, turning a simple search for love into a certain lump in the throat.

But it’s not just heartfelt vocals that make The Blue Idol so effective. Half of the album’s tracks are exuberant jigs and reels, no two of which sound the same. The utterly contemporary arrangements — at one point mixing in a jazzy sax solo — fit seamlessly with the underlying ancient voice. In the end, the success of this music probably stems largely from brilliant studio engineering that not only captures each instrument’s clear tones but also locks in on a spirit of play as immediate and human as a sweaty arm and a thumping heartbeat. Relentless rhythms, sparkling with the surprise fiddle flourish, rip by with feverish intensity. However, the album’s finest moment is neither a song nor a jig or reel; it’s “Slainte Theilinn (A Health to Teelin),” a quiet air Ni Mhaonaigh wrote for her father. The song’s tender melodic refrain sets up a breathtaking three-note countermelody, and the arrangement builds on that simple foundation with such open-ended promise that it seems to end too soon, as does the album.