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JAN '25 RÓIS – Workman’s Cellar - Ryan Kelly Anci
ent meets the new. RÓIS took to the stage at Workman’s Cellar as part of her Irish Wake Tour. Mood setting was a key part of this gig. There was a makeshift projector setup, showing clips of what looked like early 20th century rural Ireland, farmers driving horse and cart outside their thatched roof cottage type of scenery. RÓIS took to the stage wearing what I can only describe as a lace veil, almost completely covering her face, in my view an attempt to draw our focus to the performance rather than herself. She performed her latest project, MO LÉAN, cover to cover, leading us through every track. The album explores life, death, and mourning through original work, reworked hymns, and songs. The Angelus was used as an interlude between a few songs, as it is on the album itself. I got instant flashbacks to 6pm on RTÉ One. Perhaps the most interesting element of the project and this performance was the use of ‘keening’. It harks back to a pre-Christian tradition when women would wail beside the coffin of the diseased, the type of sound that peers into your soul. It really felt like everyone in the crowd was taken aback by the vocals on show—the type of gig where you just shut up and listen. If you aren’t already aware of ROÍS, you should be. Genre-bending is the only way to describe her stuff. Go listen to her album. Lisa O’Neill - National Concert Hall - Billy O’Hanluain Lisa O Neill is an artist of beguiling paradoxes, she is steeped in tradition yet utterly contemporary, her songs, especially those on All of this is Chance, are simultaneously intimate and epic, and like her Cavan mentor Patrick Kavanagh, she mines universal gold from the most local of material. Her uniqueness lies in pulling off the seemingly obvious, but so often allusive, feat of being just herself. There’s not a trace of artifice in her art. I wondered if O Neill’s songs, those poetic and sometimes brittle miniatures, would withstand the scale of an orchestra’s lungs breathing new life into them, whether they might crack, pixilated like a photo blown out of all proportion. In orchestrator Terry Edwards, O Neill has found the most empathetic and imaginative of collaborators. There are touches of Tindersticks and Beirut in his lush and melancholy arrangements, that amplify the intimacy of her original album recordings into almost cinematic tableaux, without in anyway making them saccharine as can so often happen when strings are added to acoustic songs, giving a merely jaded Vegas veneer to the music. Edwards has obviously listened closely to the source material both lyrically and musically, and O'Neill wraps the orchestra around herself like a cloak, relishing his reworkings of her melodies like a newly stitched sonic garment and boy does she wear it well! Familiar songs like “Birdy from another Realm” and “Black Sheep” that walk a delicate tightrope between dark fairy tales and animist ritual, are woven new again, in the manner of short stories being adapted for the big screen. Eschewing her usual accompaniment of banjo and guitar, she dances serpentine shapes, as if conducting the orchestra with her limbs, during the instrumental passages. It is an extraordinary sight, as she conjures her body from snakelike shimmies to bird in full flight across an orchestral sky. Her between song banter, has a fire side intimacy, it is casual but also belies a total mastery of her craft and an absolute ease in her new, and opulent surroundings. Lisa O Neill, a contemporary Cailleach, stirred ancestral embers tonight, and made them blaze anew. A triumph. Wunderhorse – Vicar Street - Jack Nolan Wunderhorse have secured their place as one of the most exciting, energetic and creative upcoming bands with their last album Midas and their recent sold out show in Vicar Street was a surreal display of it. There was a unique sense of excitement amongst the crowd. The pure ecstasy exuded by every member upon the first notes of every riff they played was magical. From the pit to the balcony we all rose in unison for their song ‘teal’, chanting the lyrics back at the band to the point you could hear more of us than of them. They’re a band that ooze an unparalleled sense of nonchalance on stage between songs with Jacob Slater speaking sparingly throughout the show. This however is in stark contrast to their explosive performances of every song that has now become synPAGE 29