This is How the Ladies Dance

Battle of the Folk Bands winners at the 2018 Edinburgh Tradfest, Glasgow-based five-piece Eabhal originally came together on the isle of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. This is How the Ladies Dance, their debut on disc, sees the young quintet glossing the venerable traditions of Scotland's Highlands and Islands with a fresh, contemporary attitude to style while venturing over the sea for broader context to Ireland and as far afield as Québec.

Piper Hamish Hepburn (who also contributes flutes and whistles) and Kaitlin Ross' vocals make an immediate impression in a deftly mature-sounding amalgam of familiar and new material. Megan MacDonald's singing accordion and Jamie MacDonald's fleet, biting fiddle add a salty Hebridean tang to the tightly-knit ensemble playing, inked in by Nicky Kirk's responsive guitar. But it's Ross who steals the show throughout: lithe and lyrical in album opener ‘Beir Soiridh’, a traditional waulking song given a new twist by the MacDonald siblings; luminous in ‘An Ribhinn Donn’ and acrobatically poetic and playful in the Irish-language ‘Cáit’. There are impressive instrumentals too in the virtuoso dialogue between accordion, whistle and fiddle in the effervescent ‘Lads’ and newly-penned ‘MaSìm’ with Hepburn's pipes fabulously to the fore. An impressive musical calling card.