It is said that crows are not always available to give warning. But you should still listen here.

Release Date : 4th October 2025

Label : Self-Released

Format : CD / Digital

IN FINE FETTLE

A cause for celebration on so many levels, this 5th release finds the Hereford/Worcester based Irish folk-rockers in fine fettle. Anyone who has caught this quartet live will already appreciate quite what a stamp they put on the genre, that craic always harder to reproduce in the studio. Suffice to say, this time they capture the mercury meticulously and you could be in the room with them. It is fair to say this is their most politicised recording yet, seeing the band strive to be seen as more as folk-punk agit-rockers than the, possibly, gentler image of before. And why not?!

UNSUBTLE IS GOOD

A shouted 1,2,3,4 lights the blue touch paper for Racist, which leaps out the traps with an unsubtle wallop. Unsubtle but no less convincing, the subject warranting exactly that bluntness. Paul O’Neill spits out the lyrics, with the wagged finger “now, now, now” especially effective, pots and kettles blackened all. Racism in Ireland is his target, incredulous it can exist, expanding then the target much wider. He is likely thrashing his battered acoustic into sawdust, but it is the frantic fiddle of Caitlin Barret that imprints most, as she saws about him with a zesty vim, mingling melody with message.

The engine room is where most the change is apparent; although Laurence Aldridge and Jim Smith have been around for some time, only now have they drawn their grebo metal-head appearances into the equivalent auditory focus. There is a lovely section, in this opener, where Smith strides his bass out into the spotlight, alone bar some pizzicato tinkles from Barratt, with Aldridge then adding some lovely dubby timbale asides.

Sweaty after only one track, On The Road starts off slowly, with a a characteristically Hibernian smear of fiddle, before crunching back up through the gears into Levellers and Ferocious Dog territory. O’Neill sound less angry, his voice now a more measured brogue, an anthem to where festival bands have to make their home. His electric guitar is more audible now, the cement binding the rhythm boys with Barrett, soaring above them all. The harmony bv’s get a good show-in too. Wasting no time, Move Over grinds into a chugging growl of beration. With little doubt at to whom it is aimed, this is even more passioned than the strident opener, and the better for it.

DUBH BE GOOD TO ME

Dubh Goat begins with some spoken narrative, lifted from Irish animated tale, Pullin’ The Devil By The Tail, becoming then a smoky instrumental that takes Barrett’s jiggy fiddle into a selection of backdrops. O’Neill sneaks out some guitar licks than seem to again add a touch of dub to the traveller campfire vibe. (Dubh/dub, geddit?) Oddly I am getting a flavour of Charlie Daniels in the fiddle sound, before the whole shebang goes full rasta for a few bars, and then again for the close, with some O’Neill green dreadlocked hybrid.

Possibly eavesdropping on my reference to the Devil Went Down To Georgia hitmaker, the band then go all cowboy for Wild Atlantic Woman, an ode to leaving the big city, London actually, for his woman on the coast of Donegal. The swap in stance and style is initially unexpected, but beds in swiftly, even if I prefer O’Neill the agitator, vocally, to the Killybegs cowpoke.

Dirty Habits 2.0 seems pitched between the two, as a choral “na na na” opens it up into a right old hurley that I can imagine audiences needing little prompting to join in with. Aldridge applies a rolling military marching beat to what is essentially a drinking song, and it sounds so, with the suggestion of no small reasearch having gone into it. Possibly also the only song to contemplate the risks of, um, intimate piercings in a conjugal situation, and something to consider the more fully, should you be drawn that way.

“F***ING ME AND YOU”

Gone is the day when an Irishman singing about an Orangeman should automatically be assumed to be about issues over the border from O’Neill’s original Donegal homestead; although in the north of Ireland, Co. Donegal is anything but in Northern Ireland. For this is a song about THE Orange Man, with a clip from one of his speeches handily appending the beginning, lest any doubt be remaining. O’Neil affects a facsimile of how the Donald might actually himself sing, a terrifying concept in itself. The lyric is neither big or clever, like the man addressed, and if you don’t find yourself soon singing the refrain, and with gusto, well, you’re a better person than I.

Realising this album is probably not meant for early morning listening, and before heavier heads lift from pillows, Blarney, another instrumental, hammers home that it is fuelled for and by the night before, for carousing and not saying no to just one more pint. With the sound of a hooley rounding out the backdrop, Barrett finds the fluidity of folk dance, whilst her compadres dial it up to a hardcore11, for the always on the brink of accelerating rhythm.

CHOOSE WISELY?

The roustabout before sets the store for one of the more incisive songs presented, Castles, as in in the sand, with the exhortation to make all your necessary life decisions applicably and appropriately, with several choices offered, ahead pointing out the futilty of so doing: “All that you made, all that you planned, all that you saved- castles in the sand“. Ouch! Barrett’s makes use of her pedal board to add additional atmospheric, and the intermittent disco scrub of O’Neill’s guitar is perfect. Overall, I think it is my favourite track yet, if driving On The Road to a close second, or third, as I recall Move Over.

The close, the almost hymnal Our Day Will Come returns, or seems to, to the troubling events in Gaza. A song for solidarity, it plies an anthemic chorus that is uncomplicated by excess verbiage. Undeniably heartfelt, it displays a more pastoral and less aggressive side of the band’s sleeve based hearts. As Barrett’s fiddle takes on the lustre of a chapel organ, it helps to bring the hopes expressed into focus.

PECULIARLY POTENT

Roving Crows can be pleased with this, their contribution to the peculiarly potent territory that Celtic folk-punk occupies. The abundant layers are there for you to unpeel as you wish. Or, not, as you choose, the craic sufficient for both thinking about and dancing to.

Move Over. (Darling probably inadvisable.)

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