Search - Sharon Shannon :: Out the Gap

The baby-boomers who have led the Irish folk-music revival have long had an aversion to drum & bass, viewing these dance-band implements as a betrayal of tradition and a sellout to commercialism. As a result their records have often been dazzling in the higher ranges but undernourished on the bottom, where only the bodhran and bouzouki hold sway. Sharon Shannon has no such compunctions, and she features drum & bass on eight of the dozen numbers on her second solo album, Out the Gap. The accordionist, who has toured as part of the Waterboys, has reinforced the rhythmic bottom of traditional Celtic music and given it a balance it has long needed. When she plays the bouncy melody to the old reel, "The Dunmore Lasses," for example, Paul Blake's drum kit and Trevor Hutchinson's electric double bass make the bounce harder and higher. Thus it's no surprise when Shannon's accordion solo gives way to Richie Buckley's sax solo. The all-instrumental album draws its material from traditional Irish, French-Canadian, Finnish, and American sources as well as from modern fiddlers in Scotland, Chicago, and County Mayo. Shannon is a solid squeezebox player, but it's not her virtuosity so much as her arrangement ideas which make this album sound so fresh. --Geoffrey Himes