Roots CDs: The Angel Brothers - Forbidden Fruit (Wrecking Ball Records)
Gerry O'Connor - Journeyman (Lughnasa Music)
By Sue Wilson

Not to be confused with the Irish banjo maestro who shares his name, Dundalk-born fiddler Gerry O’Connor co-founded the influential group Skylark – also featuring the great Antrim singer Len Graham – in 1986. Five years later, he went on to form Lá Lugh, alongside his wife, Eithne Ní Uallacháin, again specialising in the South Ulster repertoire, before the band’s blossoming career was cut short by Ní Uallacháin’s untimely death in 1999.
O’Connor’s first solo release, the modestly-titled Journeyman (presumably intended here in its sense of a time-served craftsman, rather than a jobbing labourer) is an excellent set of tunes learned from and/or written by an array of musical friends and mentors over the years. Ranging across most of Ireland’s musical regions, it features vibrant accompaniment from O’Connor’s son Dónal on fiddle and piano, Paul McSherry on guitar, Martin Quinn and Martin O’Hare on accordion and bodhrán, and Neil Martin on cello.
It’s an album utterly devoid of frills or gimmicks and is all the more rewarding for it, relying instead on the woody, full-bodied tone, supple ornamentation and expertly measured pace of O’Connor’s playing – including a couple of fine father/son fiddle duets – together with the quality of his chosen material, much of it revealing a distinct Scots flavour.

Citing influences as wide-ranging as Indian classical music, western dance rhythms, Andalucian folk and Ennio Morricone, this Doncaster-based posse is apparently one of Andy Kershaw’s favourite bands, and has made a string of hit festival appearances south of the border.
With a line-up that includes classical and acoustic guitars, marimba, piano, Wurlitzer, banjo, fiddle, tabla, bouzouki, accordion and percussion, plus guest vocals in English, Spanish and Punjabi, they certainly encapsulate the current global roots/fusion zeitgeist, and it’s not hard to discern that they’d put on a formidable live show.
On their second album, though, the mix proves rather less successful: teeming with bright ideas, strong musicianship and cross-cultural hybrid vigour, for sure, but with a little too much emphasis on the layering of textures, as opposed to your actual vocal or melodic through-lines. It leaves many tracks sounding somewhat shapeless.
All the ingredients that are present dovetail or spark off each other effectively enough, but there is a lack _of clear structure sometimes that _gives the impression of noodling around for its own sake, and tends to relegate the overall sound into interesting but unfocused background music.