Kin

Four years after the startling experiment in looping and overdubbing of his solo debut, The Tin Fiddle, Donegal fiddler Damien McGeehan’s follow-up is an altogether different proposition. Jam-packed with guests, excitedly layered with accents drawn from jazz, rockabilly and Senegalese kora music, Kin can’t be faulted for trying to push the envelope of Irish traditional music and for pushing the boat out with an often bristlingly busy sense of ensemble, even if McGeehan occasionally gets lost within what results.

Lead-off taster single, ‘Runnin’ on Bourbon’, is a volatile, brass-fuelled tribute to New Orleans jazz threaded around McGeehan’s dancing fiddle while ‘Moonlighting’ nods towards the free-flowing fantasy of Stéphane Grappelli against a percussively animated backdrop. There’s an agreeable collision between laid-back reggae and funk snap to ‘Dúlamán Na Binne Búidhe’ and ‘The Girl & the Lass’ sparkles with music-box sweetness. But it’s the pared-back offerings – the jaunty ‘Errity’s Jigs’ and relaxed reverie of ‘Paddy’s Tune’ – along with a trio of characterfully delivered songs by McGeehan’s wife, Shauna Mullin, that catch the attention here with simplicity and directness as their watchwords. If it all feels caught between competing ideas that never quite cohere, there’s still no faulting McGeehan’s often lightly worn but always engaging musicianship.