Gig review: Crooked Still/Lau

Published on Monday 24 January 2011 19:18

CROOKED STILL / LAU ABC, GLASGOW ***

IF MUTUAL admiration was enough to ensure onstage magic, this could have been the gig of Celtic Connections.

To hear these two confirmed festival favourites talk about each other in such glowing terms, one could reasonably have expected a cataclysmic meeting of minds. Instead we got a pleasant but still relatively decorous hoedown.

Prior to the communal finale, there were business-as-usual sets from both bands, each interpreting their respective traditions with a modern slant, and adding their own material to the well. Lau's set tended to the introspective and, during one folk ballad, somewhat turgid but Aidan O'Rourke's consummate fiddle playing and the lightly enhancing pedal steel guitar lifted the mood.

Boston's Crooked Still were jollier, even when performing murder ballad Henry Lee, partly thanks to Aoife O'Donovan's country pop voice, which felt like a light garnish on the group's cohesive folk and bluegrass stew. Their song selection was diverting enough, but not especially trenchant.

The playing from both groups was just as fluid when they collaborated on a handful of songs in the encore. They made a nice noise together, but the material just didn't have the zing to match O'Donovan's enthusiasm, apart from Locust In The Willow, a new composition by Crooked Still's fiddle player Brittany Haas. The audience, itching to take flight to something unremittingly upbeat by this point, greeted it like an old friend.