Ashlar

Còig are a powerhouse, multiple award-winning quartet from Cape Breton, not to be confused with Northern Ireland's Cúig. They are made up of Chrissy Crowley and Rachel Davis on fiddles, Jason Roach (piano), and Darren McMullen (mandolin, guitar, banjo). Their fourth album, Ashlar, takes its name from a type of masonry pattern where each stone fits together perfectly, despite not having the same shape or size. You can see why that notion might have appealed to them, as tunes here come from sources as intriguingly diverse as Michael McGoldrick, whose ‘Farewell to Whalley Range’ is part of ‘Uncle Leo's Jigs’, named for a local craft brewery, and Canada's great songsmith Gordon Lightfoot, with his ‘Home from the Forest’ sung by McMullen, as is ‘The Capable Wife’, first heard by him as Kate Rusby's ‘The Old Man’. Typically of this seductive and inspiring set, a stately version of ‘O Luiadh’, sung in Gaelic by Davis, somehow flows seamlessly on from the boisterous ‘From the Old Tapes’, inspired by the fiddle tunes Roach and Crowley grew up learning from old cassette tapes.