Reviews / Forget the genres…just enjoy
“A FUSION of styles” is a phrase often used to describe Shooglenifty’s music.
It’s a bit lazy, but this particular band fits nicely into the genre ‘electro-folk-jazz’ while the oft-coined phrase ‘acid-croft’ usually gets thrown in there too.
Even their own website can’t quite put a finger on what to name their style, plumping for ‘hypno-folkadelic ambient trad’.
Really the best thing to do is just forget the genre and go along to see them play.
On Saturday night at Mareel, the tunes the band knocked out ranged from weepy-eyed Celtic ballads to rumbas, and from acid-house fiddle rock to distorted banjo solos, and the audience just lapped it up.
For a band consisting of drums, banjo, guitars, fiddle, bass, and mandolin, and a rack of pedal effects that would keep any heavy rock axe-man happy into his old age, some of their songs are hauntingly beautiful.
Others were obviously penned to lead the way forward in Celtic folk fusion (there we go again!) for the likes of the Peatbog Faeries to follow (but Shooglenifty have the huge benefit, in my opinion, of not bringing pipes to the show).
Star of the show was frontman and hirsute fiddler Angus R Grant. Mincing and slinking about the stage during each tune, and delivering some fine introductions in between – “This song is about the man who drove Bjork around Lewis – it’s called ‘Bjork’s Chaffeur’” – for instance, he kept us all entertained to the last.
I last saw the band at an all-seated venue, yet Grant still managed to get half the audience there up for a dance between the seats. This was, of course, not an issue at Mareel where some quite fabulous getting-on-down was going on, but then this is the only band ever to have seen a stage invasion at the Sydney Opera House, so what do you expect?
Many of their tunes have a certain amount of crescendo-building about them, from ‘Excess Baggage’ – “for the good folk at Loganair” – to the wonderful ‘Eccentric’.
This band are incredibly coherent, though. They really do work well, and hard, together, and there’s no doubt that every single member is absolutely vital to the whole performance.
At one point I focused for a while on each individual performer, watching them play, listening to each note, and trying to imagine the overall sound without their contribution. It just doesn’t work. They are each needed, and they know it. And what a remarkable sound they create.
The crowd was a good 300 strong. It’s a bit of a shame that only half that number turned out to see support band Vair – but that’s their loss.
The four local lads treated the dedicated early comers to some fine tunes, a song, and some rather brilliant banjo and mandolin playing, as well as a joke or two.
“Vair translates into English as ‘squirrel fur’…” said box drummer (I’m not actually sure what you call that instrument) Erik Peterson. “No, it actually means ‘something beautifully made’.”
Watching Vair, though, I was reminded of a comment by Danish fiddle-player Jes Kroman: “The speed that the young people in Shetland play… it’s too fast. Way, way too fast.”
There was no doubting the talent, but you just wanted them to slow down a bit so you could hear it properly.
Graham Uney
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