Smallworld

Dallahan reach their half-decade with album number three, Smallworld. It's a cleverly knowing title for a quintet of roving Irish, Scottish and Hungarian musicians who have made Edinburgh their home but whose musical horizons extend much further afield. Coming solidly into their own and with accents from the Balkans and North America spliced with jazz, funk and pop idioms, the result is a fresh, multi-hued and contemporary take on Irish traditional music. Eastern Europe is noticeably to the fore in the slow-burning opener ‘Aye Chiki Chiki’ (flaring into a rapturous duet between Jani Lang's fiddle and Ciarán Ryan's banjo) and passionate, Roma Gypsy-tinted closing track ‘Arok Arok’.

Jack Badcock's imploring vocals come gloriously into focus in his own Americana-infused ‘Footsteps’, the aching ‘Jailsong’ and the keening ‘Mother’ – all destined to be live performance favourites. So too ‘Terrarium’, a blistering set of reels that finds Andrew Waite's accordion stepping up to the plate with a combustible style echoed in the richly variegated ‘Toby's’. Bev Morris' redoubtable double bass provides a twangy, rhythmic grounding for ‘Longside Road’, while ‘Dilmano’, a traditional Hungarian setting of the poet László Nagy, is given anthemic treatment with Ryan's crystalline mandolin offering a balm to the driving accordion accompaniment. In all: a step up and a step forward.