Breabach - Live Reviews
NEW: Cheltenham Folk Festival (Cheltenham Town Hall, 14th Feb 2009)
KARL DALLAS reckons a young Scottish outfit puts the English acts to shame at the Cheltenham Folk Festival.
"Sometimes you've just gotta hold on and keep the faith when things begin to get grotty. There was I, thinking the 13th Cheltenham Folk Festival was going to be unlucky for me if I thought I might find the spark that's been firing up folk for several decades. Then, suddenly, four young Scots take to the stage and the entire Town Hall catches fire.
Breabach is their name and hearing this quartet of two Highland pipers, a fiddle-player and a guitarist revives my long-held belief that there is indeed life after folk....Breabach come on and blow my socks off. This quartet consists of Calum MacCrimmon (pipes, whistles, backing vocals), Patsy Reid (five-string fiddle, vocals), Ewan Robertson (guitar, vocals) and Donal Brown (pipes, flute and whistles, stepdance). Two pipers playing in unison could be in danger of overegging the pudding, but believe me, the combination works. Reid's single solo vocal is as bonny as her pretty face, and as for her fiddle-playing, it's a long time since I have heard something that makes me so astonished.
Breabach are, of course, a Scottish group, and the Scots folk scene has always had more fire in its belly than more taciturn folkies south of the border. This has got nothing to do with any spurious "Celticness" and everything to do with the way Scottish folk has not ghettoised itself from the rest of its national culture. This doesn't mean aping the mannerisms of pop or the concert stage. Why do so many of the young English singers think they have to slow down the last line of every song with an operatic rallantando? And for God's sake, can we stop plugging acoustic guitars into the PA?I heard one performer play through a mic, rather than a DI line and the resulting richness was closer to the true sound of the guitar, superior to the tinniness of the plugged-in axe.
Am I becoming a grumpy old curmudgeon in my dotage? Certainly, but not for long when bands like Breabach take the stage."
by Karl Dallas for The Morning Star. Read the whole review.
NEW: Cheltenham Folk Festival (Cheltenham Town Hall, 14th Feb 2009)
"The phenomenon that is Breabach hit the stage like a highland army advancing out of the mountain mist, their double header of twin bagpipes putting out a big ‘in your face’ sound high on energy and rhythm. Frighteningly young to be this accomplished, they then took us off the mountains and into the glens with a wonderfully melodic combination of fiddle, flute and whistle, before leaving us with a last stunning barrage of pipe-driven reels."
by Eric Worrall. Read the whole review.
Piping Live! 2008: International Piping Night (Strathclyde Suite, GRCH, 15 Aug 2008)
SESSION A9 / BREABACH (Nevis Centre, Fort William, 9 May 2008)