"Revitalising, if not revolutionary"

Sometimes you just have to hold up your hands, admit defeat and leave it to the professionals.

Reviewing John Francis Flynn's set at the Globe in support of Fat White Family recently, I tried to explain what makes what he does so special: "These are songs that are not so much covered as carefully handed down, passed from generation to generation, and Flynn is clearly a respectful yet innovative custodian, allowing the past to speak through (and to) the present."

But, writing about Flynn's fellow Dubliners Lankum for the Quietus, Darran Anderson has done an infinitely better job (albeit with the luxury of a more generous word limit). His review of Live In Dublin is eloquent, insightful and relentlessly on the money, weaving history, politics and cultural analysis into his assessment of the record. 

So it is that he talks about Lankum's "reverence for the original innovations and possibilities of the music, while shrugging off kitsch and the cold dead hand of the gatekeepers and priests of trad music" - or, putting it another way, describes them not as "pious memorialists to archaic songs and folklore" but as "reanimators restoring troubled and troubling things to life again". 

Perhaps most perceptive is his observation that "Lankum, like The Pogues, The Dubliners and many others, are a radical band in the truest sense of the word. The etymology of 'radical' is not to overhaul or make it new. It's to dig into the roots. To strip away all the rules and accretions and work out why any of this started or matters in the first place. To remember why it is vital."

All told, it's the sort of article that has you savouring every sentence and itching to listen to the album that inspired it.