The Livelong Day

The outstanding ten minutes of ‘The Wild Rover’ dominates this third album from Ireland's most significant band. Drawing on the older, regretful, desperate 17th-century source for the popular ballad, it features Radie Peat's singular voice in grainy close-up, drawing a heavy line across a music that foods and streams around her.

The instrumental ‘Ode to Lullaby’ has a pulsing, semi-acoustic 1970s Kosmische feel, while ‘Bear Creek’ leavens a seesawing drone with a more conventional fiddle tune, ascending and descending like one of Escher's impossible staircases. ‘Katie Cruel’ features another strong Radie Peat vocal, this song of a sex worker as pertinent in the age of modern slavery as ever it was. Her voice is steeped in dark tones, sustained over a musical equivalent of glistening pitch. The funereal pace of ‘The Dark Eyed Gypsy’ is too slow for this listener, but the eccentric brilliance of ‘The Pride of Petravore’ steers The Livelong Day towards a powerful close with ‘Hunting the Wren’, drawing on the extraordinary story of the Wrens of the Curragh, a community of female outcasts ‘beyond the pale’ of Catholic Ireland, sung by Peat and fuelled by the quartet's uilleann pipes, concertinas, strings, Hammond, harmonium and more, enveloping each other to create abstract soundscapes of startling depth.