Happy new year I guess. It’s been a while and I wanted to publish this review much earlier, especially given that the CD was in my post box a week before the album was actually published. But first there were Christmas holidays, then were exams to mark and now I’m back to work. I didn’t even manage to finish my 2023 recaps, but who cares – let’s start 2024 with this review.
This time I’ll probably try a bit of a different approach instead of going through the album song by song. I haven’t settled on the „right“ way for me to review CDs, so I’ll just go with my own flow.
The artist
Fiddler’s Green have been one of my favourite bands for more than 16 years now. I discovered them in 2007 on a festival. Back then, Pat Prziwara was still more or less a fresh member and their album Drive Me Mad had been out for about half a year. Their live energy was pretty convincing and ever since, I’ve loved this bands.
If you don’t know them: Fiddler’s Green play Irish Folk rock / punk, depending on which song you listen to. It’s fast, it’s danceable and their CDs are full of their own interpretations of traditional Irish folk songs. Besides the fiddle and the accordion, which are fixed part of (almost) every song, they make use of instruments like the Irish bouzouki, mandolin or Bodhrán, often joined by bagpipes and Irish whistles. You see, the folk vibe is strong.
The Green Machine is their 17th studio album, EPs excluded. There’s one compilation for their 25th anniversary in 2015 and they have several live albums on top. If you ask me, that’s quite a discography. I came with high expectations when I listened to The Green Machine for the first time, since their last two albums (Seven Holy Nights, a christmas album, and Three Cheers for Thirty Years, their 30-anniversary-album) were not able to thrill me as much as the two albums before (Heyday and Devil’s Dozen – the latter still being one of my all-time favourite albums).
And I can say: I wasn’t disappointed.
The album
Interestingly, the first three songs on the album are also the songs that were released as singles (and on top of that, in the exact same order as they are on the album). It starts with Shanghaied in Portsmouth, which is a feature with Mr Hurley from the German folk band Mr Hurley und die Pulveraffen. They’re anything but serious and they’re known to practically anyone who has ever visited a medieval market in Germany, because they seem to play on all of them. So if I remember correctly, we got to hear the song performed with Mr Hurley himself at the MPS in Bückeburg last summer. The music video, by the way, tells the story of the song.
And here I quote Wikipedia:
Shanghaiing or crimping is the practice of kidnapping people to serve as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence.
Song number 2 is called The Bog and it’s a perfect example of a typical Fiddler’s Green song, including Albi’s tongue twister singing in the pre-chorus and chorus. Also I’m a sucker for the violin (after all, the violin was what made me fall for this band in the first place and at concerts you’ll most likely find me in the front row, right in front of their fiddler Tobias Heindl). This song has such great live energy and is just tons of fun.
The third song is A Good Old Irish Bar and it was released only a few weeks before the album came out. It’s one of their punkrockier songs – and another stereotypical Fiddler’s Green song in so far that they always need some drinking songs – or songs that praise pubs and drinking.
Then there are a few songs that might count as fun songs. One of them is I don’t like alcohol (with the core message that „alcohol likes me“). Did I mention the drinking-related songs? There’s another song from that category: Hangover, unsurprisingly, focuses on the outcome of all the drinking. When I read the name on the tracklist I was seriously worried to get a Taio Cruz cover, but nope. Thankfully they wrote about their own hangovers (I guess). This one would make a great final song though, yet it’s followed by two other songs.
Category „fun song with no relation to alcohol“ is May The Road Rise Up To Meet You, which first reminds of the typical Irish blessings – and I took up the vibe, closed my eyes and enjoyed. Until the song took a very sudden turn and left me giggling like a stupid teenage girl at the „Fuck you, you bloody prick“. While vibing I had missed the first signs of the plottwist, but I liked the outcome. Please, someone gimme a Fiddler’s Green shirt with the lyrics of that song!
Also, as I said, Fiddler’s Green albums need their own interpretations of traditionals and The Green Machine includes them at the far end of the setlist. Muirsheen Durkin comes with another round of Albi’s fast tongue twisting vocals, many folk instruments as support and a typical Fiddler’s Green sound. With The Parting Glass the album closes in a calm, ballad-like way. It’s a beautiful song and an even better farewell than Hangover.
Speaking of calm, A Fleecy Cloud follows in the footsteps of songs like Another Spring Song, Down By The Hillside or Into the Sunset Again. I love the whistles in this song, I love the fiddle, I love everything about it. Yeah, I love Fiddler’s Green for their speed, but at the same time, some of those songs mentioned above belong to my favourites. And a Fiddler’s Green album would feel unreal without anything alike.
My personal favourite on this album though is My Fairy of the West, which actually doesn’t feel much like their usual sound. The melody of the verses reminds me strongly of Ievan Polkka, which was probably what confused me the most when I first heard it. The chorus though has absolutely no similarity with said Finnish song – but, in accordance with the lyrics, more or less, I can’t help myself but dance and sing along. For real, when I first heard it, the song was an absolute mindblow, and while hearing it for the second time I knew that this would be my favourite song on this album.
Now there are two songs left that I don’t have to say much about so far. Ready for the Ball and I Need a Volunteer haven’t really caught my attention so far and I’m still waiting for them to kick in. They’re nice, but they don’t catch my attention as much as the rest of the album.
So all in all I like the new album – and I guess I like it more than Three Cheers for 30 Years, but not as much as Devil’s Dozen. Yet I’m excited to hear which songs they’ll play live at their Green Machine Tour in spring.