Reviews

Irish Music Magazine

Close to the hearth of Dublin City lies a stretch of country, which despite the blandishments of the Celtic Tiger has chosen to retain the best of its traditional values. Garristown, the Naul, Ballyboughal these are some of the villages in North county Dublin where set dancing and traditional music are as much part of community life as they ever were. This is Seamus Ennis country and the legacy of this soft-spoken giant of traditional music, songs and stories is alive and well.

Surprisingly then that we don’t hear as much about it as we might expect. Tunes from the hearth may be about to help change all that. Brendan Lynch is a fiddler from Ballyboughal and on his debut album he offers us a unique tone and wonderful sense of rhythm on twelve tracks. Woven into the fabric of theses tune are banjo, Uilleann pipes, Guitar and keyboards with the Lynch fiddle leading the way. There is a irresistible, tripping, dancing quality to the Jigs, nowhere better shown than on the set Saddle the Pony, A health to the Ladies and East at Glendart. The reels are driving powerful affairs with unison playing between the banjo and the fiddle now and then dropping into a velvety, octave to great effect.

Miss Mc Leods is given a treatment which brings it up all new and shiny and full of musical jokes a lovely counterpoint to the soulful slow airs, Wild Rose of the mountain from Shetland Islands and again from Shetland Love of our Islands and haunting Inis Oirr. Lynch sings on two tracks but fiddling is definitely his day job and how well he dose it. If this is what is going on in the north County Dublin then lets have more.

Jim Kelly

Review 2nd Album

"Hold onto your hats and chaeck the floorboards for woodworm before you play Brendan Lynch's second album. His passion and skill with the fiddle comes through every time. Brendan is also a natural live performer and Balbriggan is still buzzing and people are still talking after his last concert there which, as near as makes no difference, brough down the house."

Trevor Sargent TD

Irish Times

Don’t be thrown by the antiseptic hearth of Fingal`s Thatch cottage preservation society, because this fiddler has the driving folk virtuosity of a man far older and further north-west of Ballyboughal, north county Dublin. He brings rogue`s-technique bluegrass to the reels, full of fast, scratchy bow action and throwaway chords; or waltz coloured airs which half remind me of Tommy Peoples. Other airs labour under a leaden slumber, trying to be synthy-sweet, and the songs well they are grand. He builds better on vigorous old jigs or the slow Shetland, Wild Rose of the Mountain, with its baroque trills, schmaltzy vibrato and clever little drop of the octave, shaking out emotion, Phoo, yeah.

Mic Moroney