LAU

LAU is, pardon the phrase, a Folk supergroup.

Kris Drever is a BBC2 award winner, Martin Green has played with more of the good and great than can fit into a review and Aidan O’Rourke was voted 2006 Instrumentalist of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards and is a member of 'Blazin’ Fiddles’. The combination of the three masters has produced an album of such magnificent variety and depth that I find it difficult to find enough superlatives to do it justice.

From the opening 'Hinba’ the musicianship draws at the listener with Green’s accordion and O’Rourke’s fiddle setting the pulse chasing, Drever’s guitar work underpinning and grounding the flights of the two main instruments. On through 'Butcher Boy’, a traditional piece with words by Kris Drever.

Drever’s voice is slightly nasal, pure toned and boasts its own identity: in a world of soundalikes his broad Scottish accent has an air of true soul. The album continues with magnificent playing on 'The Jigs’ or the slightly Spanish sounding 'Results’ and on to Ewan MacColl’s 'Freeborn Man’ with its echoes of a better past and an uncertain future. 'Moorhen’ sets the listener’s mind jigging across the heathers and then Drever’s beautiful picking and O’Rourkes sweetly sorrowful fiddling bring us down to earth on 'Gallowhill’.

There isn’t a single track of filler of and no songs that are played with less than total conviction yet this is not any kind of po-faced exercise; the playing is always joyful and free. Folk music is sometimes portrayed as out of date or ultra-conservative but this music is entirely of the now and future.

The resurgence in folk music has thrown up some enormous talents in the last couple of years, Seth Lakeman and Half Cousin immediately come to mind, but LAU have it in themselves to be the most important folk voice since Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. Wonderful.