Dark folk trio Saltaire – have unveiled their highly anticipated debut EP ‘Only Moonlight & focus track

Featuring two unheard songs alongside their haunting debut original single ‘The Axe’ (RTÉ Radio 1 Recommends List), their compelling rendition of ‘Matty Groves’, and their instrumental arrangement of ‘Slip Jigs and Jenny’s’, Only Moonlight establishes Saltaire as a formidable new presence in the contemporary Irish folk and trad scene.

Self-dubbed “a band of backers”, Saltaire’s music is a collective experience, expanding outward via close friendships with some of Ireland’s most talented musicians in the folk and Irish traditional space, with their frequent collaborators, including  Ryan McAuley (of RTÉ Folk Awards ‘Best Emerging Folk Artist’ nominated band, Alfi), Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin (2024 ‘Best Folk Singer’ at the RTÉ Radio One Folk Awards), Catherine McHugh (featured on Frankie Gavin & De Danann’s album Port Eireann), Laoise FitzGerald and Alex Borwick (Niamh Regan, Sam Fender, James Vincent McMorrow, Lankum and Catfish & The Bottlemen) bringing nuance and freshness to Saltaire’s carefully selected renditions and originals, steeped in tradition and moreover incredibly inventive.

The EP’s unheard opening song and focus track, ‘Aldborough Parade’, is a stirring original love song, written by member Ian Kinsella about the feverishness of falling quickly, the ache of love stretched across an ocean, and ultimately the sweetness of finding home in another person and their music.

Followed by their richly textured interpretation of ‘Matty Groves’- a classic tale of passion, betrayal, heartbreak, and fateful consequence – this track captures the essence of Saltaire’s collaborative folk fusion. An English folk song refracted through Appalachian melodies, it is grounded by the core trio’s ominous folk cello, intricate guitar and bouzouki, and a pulsing bodhrán heartbeat. As the arrangement builds, a sonic mosaic emerges: vivid old-time banjo, bewitching Irish flute lines, dreamy piano, and haunting vocal harmonies, culminating in a climactic bouzouki-led outro from Conor Lyons.

The EP’s midway point, an instrumental arrangement of tunes ‘Fig For A Kiss’, ‘The Foxhunter’, ‘Elizabeth Kelly’s Delight’ and ‘Jenny’s Chickens’, which are composed into a set titled ‘Slip Jigs & Jenny’s’, demonstrates the traditional instrumental dimension of what Saltaire has to offer, highlighting Kaitlin Cullen-Verhauz’s  cello not only as an atmospheric and textural foundation to the Saltaire sound, but as a leading melody player in its own right.

The EP title, Only Moonlight, directly references one of the lyrics from the succeeding track (track four), a rendition of ‘Lungs’ by Townes Van Zandt. The line: “Gather up the gold you’ve found, you fool its only moonlight”, suggests something transient, something illusory or unreliable. The trio say, “Sometimes being a musician feels something like that; we try to gather gold in what we create and navigate the shifting shadows of doubt. It feels like a fitting and symbolic title for a debut EP”.

They continue, “We found ourselves drawn to Townes Van Zandt’s masterpiece ‘Lungs’, as it aptly captures the desperation of living in a society steeped in contradictions and hypocrisy; namely the disingenuous ‘love’ and ‘humanity’ of the religious far-right, thinly veiling deep rooted prejudice. The song (and particularly the penultimate verse) feels painfully pertinent in this moment and in this country as we’ve seen a rise in racism and anti-immigrant hate. People co-opting and misrepresenting the tri-colour forgetting (perhaps willfully) Ireland’s history of immigration and asylum-seeking down through the ages in the face of occupation, genocide, cultural and religious persecution.”

Written while he was in immense physical pain himself, each phrase of this song aches with frustration and disillusionment as Van Zandt parses through what it means to discover the most treacherous rot of humankind. But our critical minds are not estranged from our deeply held optimism, with the song serving as a rallying cry for truth and collective solidarity. 

Concluding the EP is Saltaire’s debut original single, ‘The Axe’, an enthralling contemporary take on the ancient ‘murder ballad’ sub-genre of folk music. The song is inspired by the true story of the infamous Axeman of New Orleans, a serial killer who terrorised the city between 1918 and 1919. A bizarre and unsettling tale, Saltaire explores the incident through music steeped in the macabre, navigating themes of fear, bigotry, the sensationalising of tragedy in pop culture/media, and the ways in which collective terror can either splinter or bind a community of people together.

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