Trá Pháidín’s second album bursts open the idea of a 21st-century traditional folk record. The Galway collective’s quicksilver, giddy exploration of Irish music, language and identity is full of stinging, joyful songs.
The record opens with Tí Mhichael Phaddy (Michael Paddy’s House), a psychedelically perfect rurality of reverb-smothered guitars and birdsong-like flutes, before an Irish woman cuts in, bigging up her countryside Airbnb on the phone. A shouty local then comically interrupts her.
A six-strong collective from Galway
Trá Pháidín (Paddy’s Beach) are a six-strong collective of brilliant musicians from Galway, Ireland’s largest Irish-speaking county. The album’s title, Cloch’s Claí (Stone and Dry Stone Wall), suggests that each track plays its own scabrous, weight-bearing part in the whole.
The 45 minutes unfold as an interrupted sequence, full of improvisation, texture and ornament, the band freely roaming other genres, revealing them as connected neighbourhoods. Mariachi and a fantastic motorik beat blast into the brilliant Garbhóg (The Rough One), before pastoralism returns.
Rage and ridicule in the lyrics
On Fothrach an Cheirtleáin (The Ruin of the Conurbation) the band strut like a disconsolate Mogwai, before To Hell or to Connacht’s intricate flutes, full of elegant, menacing repetition, swirl us into their undertow. The lyrics throughout are full of Kneecap and CMAT-grade rage.
Named after Flann O’Brien’s brilliant parody of Gaelic poverty memoirs, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) drops in rhythmic passages of words about people living in crumbling concrete, dreaming of the Celtic tiger and its tail. Seachtain na Gaeilge (Irish Language Week) is sharper still: over a slow dance, facts about the magic of the country are followed by English translations, delivered in a sinister whisper, that reveal the ridiculousness of tourism lingo (“this ancient tongue is over 10 years old”). Trá Pháidin also mock themselves for “being an Irish language band but speaking English on the sly”.
Stinging, musically all-enveloping and often unexpectedly joyful, Cloch’s Claí suggests new foundations for folk with every listen.
