by Phil Hall

Artist: Altan
Album: "The Blue Idol"
Year Produced: 2002

This offering from the Irish folk sextet consists mostly of traditional tunes from Eire, although "The Low Highland" made its way over from Scotland and "Daily Growing" arrived via England. On the whole, "The Blue Idol" is a pleasant but strangely unmemorable production. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, but at the same time it just never clicks.

Vocalist Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh sounds lovely, as ever, and she graces both the English -- and Irish-language lyrics with clear and majestic phrasing. But strangely, her singing often lacks passion -- it's as if she is going for vocal style and not substance. "Daily Growing," a tale of a woman married to a lad some years her junior, never has any emotional impact when the story's cruel finale comes about – it is so antiseptic that it could easily have been a phonetic interpretation.

Other traditional tunes, such as the "The Sea-Apprentice Boy" and two versions of "The Pretty Young Girl" (an English and Irish rendition) are casually tossed off without any evidence of attachment. There is no soul or heart here. It literally just lies there, pretty but inert.

Even the instrumental pieces are strangely enervated. It would seem like Celtic Music 101 to fire up an audience with a lively reel or a jig, but here the music just plays blandly.

Altan has done better, can do better, and (if they continue to record) hopefully will do better. But with "The Blue Idol," they goofed.


   Buy the Album: "The Blue Idol"

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Celtic MP3s Music Magazine writer, Phil Hall is contributing editor for Film Threat, book editor for the New York Resident, author of "The Encyclopedia of Underground Movies" (MWP Books) and a proud child of Wales.