Buried Treasure: Young Dubliners - Real World (2005)

I'm not the least bit Irish, but I've been a fan of Celtic-rock for quite a long time now. So, to celebrate St. Patrick's Day today I'm rerunning one of my very early posts. It was originally published here on September 10, 2005.

Keith Roberts and Young Dubliners offer a slick, polished, and commercial Irish-rock sound that befits their home base of Los Angeles. Their style is a complete contrast to bands such as Black 47 who flaunt their grittier New York City street image. While Larry Kirwan's band, along with The Saw Doctors, U2, and The Pogues, wear their shamrocks on their sleeves the Dubliners devotion to their roots is a little more subdued.

The fact that The Dubliners are more mainstream than any of the bands mentioned above is given away by the arena rock sound of the title track as well as "Touch The Sky," and "Say It's So." There are no politics on this album, no songs about rebellion, and nary a word that should upset anyone. "Please" is a love song that could be a hit on commercial FM radio and "Evermore," is a song about the singer's little girl, a subject that normally makes me cringe yet Roberts somehow manages to avoid the sappiness that is routine in most songs of its ilk.

The standard rock keyboards, guitars, and drums are often accompanied by flutes, tin whistles, and fiddles which are the tipoff that this is an Irish-rock band because the lyrics seldom let you know this fact. The most Irish track on the album is the high octane, traditional Irish tune "Waxies Dargle." There's an instrumental, "Banshee," that features some flute work by Ian Anderson.

I like Real World and you may too if you want to hear Celtic-rock without much of its harder edged subject matter.

Comments

  1. William Kates9:31 PM, July 10, 2005

    Sounds interesting. I'm kicking myself now for not recording their WXPN Free-at-Noon concert several months ago; maybe someday it will get repeated.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All-Time Popular Posts

Slower Than Slow: 16 RPM Records

Image
Have you ever heard of a long forgotten vinyl format, the 16 2/3 RPM record? They were half the speed of the 33 1/3 RPM albums that were the traditional standard for recorded music. Most record players in the 1950s and 1960s came with a speed setting to play these long forgotten discs that were considered novelties even during the years they were available. Because most, but not all, 16s had big holes and were 7" in diameter many of them were mistaken for 45 RPMs and at that size the speed allowed for up to 20 minutes of playing time per side. However, there was no true standard size and they were also manufactured to be 9, 10, or 12 inches in diameter, and these larger records played even longer. Just like the other speeds and formats 16s could be played one record at a time or stacked on a changer for continuous play. Radio stations often used the discs for pre-recorded radio shows containing interviews, dramas, and documentaries. More frequen...
Read more

Why Do 45 RPM Records Have Big Holes?

Image
Today we're going to find out why 45 RPM records have much larger holes than 78s and 33s. Believe it or not I often wondered about this burning question when I was collecting hundreds of these little seven inch gems back the 1960s. According to several websites, including Answerbag , the reason for the large hole used by 45s was simple. It was difficult for the old 78s, with their smaller holes, to find their way onto jukebox spindles. The large hole effectively eliminated that problem. Strangely, seven inch 45s were often pressed with the smaller holes used for LPs in many countries outside the United States, especially in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Overseas the inserts (commonly know as spiders) were manufactured into the large holes at the factories but they could be punched out if desired. The Beatles' British single of "Love Me Do," pictured here, is a typical example. Why were the spiders built into English 45s? I was unable to fi...
Read more

10 Great Beatles Songs You May Have Never Heard

Image
I recently paid a visit to a blog that I read regularly published by my British cyber-buddy, Martin Warminger. At his site, Music Obsessive , he just listed what are, in his opinion, the worst Beatles songs of all time . It's an idea I wanted to steal, and I could come up with a short but bad list, but for the sake of originality I decided to do something completely different instead. So, here is a list of ten songs by my all-time favorite band that deserve a better place in the annals of Beatles history. Most of them are only known by their hardcore fans. Here they are in chronological order. You can listen to a few of the rarer ones below. 1. I'll Be On My Way The only known recorded version of this very early, 1963, Lennon-McCartney ditty appears on Live at The BBC . The Beatles never put it on vinyl. Yes, it's simplistic and the lyrics even have the audacity to rhyme the word "moon" with "June." However, the song has one of those undeni...
Read more