The Haar – The Lost Day: Album Review

By Seuras Og on 6th December 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

The Haar shine more new light through familiar windows, spruced up with even more global vision and design.

Release Date : 5th December 2025

Label : Under The Eaves

Format : CD / Digital

NEW SHAPES & FORMS

The Haar is but one string to the bow or finger to the key of Adam Summerhayes and Murray Grainger, the fiddle and accordion duo, so acclaimed for their improvisational way with tunes traditionally derived. We know them already as The Ciderhouse Rebellion, but this is their expanded format, encompassing the maverick percussion palette of bodhran maestro, Cormac Byrne and near-feral Irish chanteuse, Molly Donnery, where the Great Irish Songbook is their target.

We caught them live a while back, pleased to see them pursue a continuing theme, in their deliberate tackling of the best known ballads and the most widely covered tunes. Songs that are familiars all, and not always in a good way, rewiring them into new shapes and forms. So, much as they blew new life into Danny Boy, The Wild Rover and Whiskey In The Jar, on 2022’s Where Old Ghosts Meet, here similar favours are granted to The Galway Shawl and Star Of The County Down, amongst others.

WILD ABANDON

Only eight songs here, yet the album still stretches out to 44 minutes, with lengths varying between just over a couple of minutes to nearly nine. Spancil Hall leads the way, and gives a good idea of the band’s MO. An accordion fanfare triggers it all off, with Donnery’s gnarly vocal style immediately to the fore. Her’s is a world where yowly is high praise, such is the wild abandon in her voice.

Disconsolate fiddle veers in slowly, before Byrne kickstarts, or should that be handstarts, a choogly rhythm. Summerhaye’s fiddle picks up cello like prolonged scrapes, as Grainger’s accordion fills in all the spaces, and leaves more, the sign of a true virtuoso. Like Leveret, these two musicians famously eschew the repetition of rehearsal, favouring firing off each other, in and as the moment demands. It is fair to say this version sounds little like that by the Corrs. And certainly nothing like that by Peat & Diesel.

BEWILDERING & BEGUILING

Óró Sé Do Bheatha’ Bhaile is a melody we all know, often without knowing the name. Sinead O’Connor does an exquisitely fragile crystalline take on it, but Donnery here takes it another way entirely. Her words chararacteristically run into one another, blurring the edges, whether in Irish, as here, or English, and give her voice an almost instrumental quality, evocative of either uillean pipes or whistle. The arrangement, mind, is pure Hibernian skank, with clipped accordion and bodhran backbeat, to which then is added the Balkan textures of the fiddle. A bewilderingly and beguilingly effective juxtapositioning.

It takes bravery to cover The Lakes Of Ponchartrain, with the Paul Brady and Hothouse Flowers versions seeming both yardsticks too high to contemplate. Well, let me report that the Haar get ascloseasthis to eclipsing both, the difference channeled via the alternate sex vocal and a doomier, gloomier atmosphere by far. The textural arrangement seems to evoke the song being sung in a remote wood cabin in the frozen hills, far far away from the lakeside shore, in a country across the sea. The accordion sound is of a wheezy chapel organ. The exuberantly jolly Star Of The County Down, up next, is an inevitable contrast, but escapes any vapid paddywhackery by virtue the instrumental scaffold, with pizzicato fiddle and Grainger’s box drifting into free jazz territory.

UNDOUBTED HIGHPOINT

Shortest track here, Madam, I’m A Darling, gets licked and polished into a tribal chant, replete with township polyrhythms, courtesy Byrne. Although Summerhayes and Grainger pile in, at the halfway mark, here they are almost superfluous, something seldom ever said about their contributions; voice and bhodran might have been enough. Particularly as Anachie Gordon then starts with such a slow and reverent, almost hymnal sheen. This much travelled Scottish song is gifted a gloriously maudlin coat of paint. The fiddle, box and skin are all muted, so as to maximise the crack in Donnery’s vocal, the rip that accentuates and makes perfect her voiceprint. Byrne adds little other than a hollow episodic patter, with the other instruments playing slow and low. It is an impressive statement, the undoubted highpoint of the album.

AN EMOTIVE MONSTER

The Rocky Road To Dublin is here for light relief, right? Hmm, well maybe, but the fiddlestring percussion gives a new-age ambient hit, before further Balkan textures sweep in, possibly from even further East. If the Bulgarian State Televison Female Choir were to suddenly join in, it wouldn’t sound remotely out of place.

Finally, with the full shebeen of Donnery’s acapella start, The Galway Shawl builds slowly, step by step, verse by verse. Suddenly sentimental tosh has become an emotive monster. Resisting the temptation to end in the pandemonium of a pell mell flourish, this demonstrates the quartet’s tight control on atmospherics, with the album becoming another impressive statement in the Summerhayes and Grainger story, as well as that of Byrne and Donnery.

Here’s Anachie Gordon, from Shrewsbury, three years back, with the intro drawn out even more enticingly back: