Madra Salach at New Century

Madra Salach means “dirty dog” in Irish, and singer Paul Banks, by all accounts, lives up to the name onstage. The Guardian‘s feature on the band flagged a “feral, snarling energy” running through their take on Ireland’s ongoing folk revival, with Banks himself an “astonishing force” with an unruliness likened to Liam Gallagher’s own. To anyone who’s listened to the measured balladry of their debut EP, this might all sound a bit surprising.

Madra Salach share the raw, drone-heavy instrumentation of a band like Lankum – harmonium, mandolin and tin whistle sit at the centre of their sound – but the mood their fantastic EP It’s a Hell of an Age settles into is closer to someone like Lisa O’Neill: stark, mournful, and very, very beautiful.

Covers like ‘Spancil Hill’ pair with originals such as ‘Murphy Can Never Go Home’, which traces an Irish labourer’s slow drift from home while working in Britain – the kind of pained songwriting that’s a calling card of Ireland’s fast-moving folk resurgence. Live, though, Madra Salach threaten to tip into something else entirely: something rowdier, punkier.

That threat is still mostly a promise rather than a document; only those who’ve attended their Dublin pub sessions, their packed festival sets, or their recent sold-out headline gigs have the full picture. The rest of us get a mere taste with the new live version of their crushingly beautiful song, ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’, released specifically to capture the band’s evolved live energy and arrangements.

After listening to It’s a Hell of an Age, Madra Salach became a need-to-watch in our calendar, and that was before we were tantalised with all this vaguely-Jekyll-and-Hyde business. At New Century, on a UK tour where dates either side have already sold out, that’s the pitch: one thing on record and another thing live. That gap might be the thing most worth heading down for.