Frenzy of the Meeting

The sixth album from popular Scottish quintet Breabach follows two years of international touring during which they won Best Folk Band and Best Album titles at the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards and received nominations in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and Songlines Music Awards 2017 (for Frenzy of the Meeting's predecessor, Astar).

Breabach's aim is to present music drawn from their largely Highland roots in a contemporary sound and they succeed here with judicious use of electric guitar and Moog alongside bagpipes, fiddle, whistles, wooden flute, acoustic guitar, double bass and vocals in both Gaelic and English.

‘Invergordon's Welcome’, a march and puirt à beul medley, is a good example of established material being respectfully and spiritedly refreshed. Among their own compositions, piper Calum MacCrimmon's pacey ‘Knees Up’ segues neatly into fiddler Megan Henderson's fine singing of an anthemic new Gaelic song co-written by MacCrimmon and Henderson's brother Ewen Henderson. Singer-guitarist Ewan Robertson contributes the amiably sung ‘Birds of Passage’, inspired by Longfellow, and the nostalgic ‘Òran Bhràigh Rùsgaich’ inhabits an atmospheric sound world.