Album review - Galway's Trá Pháidín release genre busting 'Cloch’s Claí'
Galway-based collective Trá Pháidín channel traditional Irish music, free jazz, drone, spoken-word satire and anger on their brilliant second album Cloch’s Claí.
Following on from their 2023 release An 424, the six-piece, Galway-based collective Trá Pháidín re-emerge with a masterful album, blending traditional Irish music and composition with free jazz, drone and spoken-word satire. Cloch’s Claí (‘Stone and Wall’) charters another conceptual project, inspired by the stone-wall constructions characteristic of rural Ireland fields, and influenced by Myles na gCopaleen’s satirical novel An Béal Bocht, which parodied the Gaeltacht autobiographies of the early 20th century and the unique ways that misery and hardship are presented in Irish culture.
Cloch’s Claí marks a turning of the tide in a new era of Irish folk music; a darker exploration, miles below the tip of the pub-session iceberg, into something deeper, more sinister, more compelling.
Cloch’s Claí, the band’s first release under the World of Echo label, marks a turning of the tide in a new era of Irish folk music; a darker exploration, miles below the tip of the pub-session iceberg, into something deeper, more sinister, more compelling. The ten-track album swims in soft yet punctuating layers that swell and crash, with each song feeding and melting into each delightfully. Through various spoken-word pieces dotted throughout the album, the bilingual collective unravel the modern-day conflicts that the Irish identity and language faces.
The opening track, Tí Mhichael Phaddy follows a pulsating bassline, with swirling wind instruments, strings and trance-inducing percussion, an uneasy yet magnetic arrangement. The satirical nature of Trá Pháidín’s perspective is immediately apparent, mocking the closed-off Dublin office worker, and their views of a cushy weekend getaway in a picturesque Airbnb. Her voice call home floats into earshot, along with her discomfort at a run-in with a local disrupting her escape from the corporate world. (“What’s hello in Irish? Em… Dia dhuit?”)
An Béal Bocht has a strong bass and tentative drums that encircle in a repeating, forward-facing rhythm, mixed in with rapid chanting as Gaeilge. This track drops straight into Garbhóg a heavy, trad-infused rock tune.
If it is the wildness and the disturbed madness of Connemara Irish that you are afraid of, then Trá Pháidín will be your best worst nightmare. They take the ‘mad Paddy’ connotations associated with Irish-speaking regions and run with it, expressing feels of urgency and absurdity in their music that has rarely seen such pointed expression in any other musical project.
Seachtain na Gaeilge confronts the ways in which modern-day Ireland attempts to place Irish in quantifiable, neat boxes, identifying the “marketing potential of the Irish language”. The track is a slow-burner, lead by an Irish narrator, with sharp, frantic whispers of translation into English. The narrator tells the tourist-friendly, ridiculous facts of an “ancient tongue… over ten years old”. The band also engage in self-mockery, confronting the irony of being an Irish-speaking band that “speaks English on the sly.”
Anglicise Everything is a dark and disorientating track, a turn towards seeing the album's conceptual world in a state of deepening decay, or disruption from unwanted visitors. An exaggerated, nasally Dublin accent is heard in fits and starts, giving a nod to the growing problem of housing shortages in rural Irish towns because of Airbnb takeovers. One ignorant voice calls out “Why don’t they just live in the Airbnbs?”... “I can’t wait to go back to Dingle.”
Dance Paddy Dance features a fast-tempo, shuffling drum beat, capturing the performative aspects of Irish culture and language, the objectification of Irishness, and in turn, the erosion of reality.
Trá Phaidín are redefining Irish geography and the commodification of Irish history and culture through raw emotional instinct. This album is desperately needed, underlying the contradictory ways that Irishness and the Irish language exist in Ireland’s current-day cultural landscape. It confronts how these dual existences cannot be explained away - their absurdity persists, but within it there is something raw and urgent to cling on to, something perhaps more poignant than a slogan on a t-shirt, a pub ballad or a mystifying, alluring cultural attraction.
Cloch’s Claí is a masterpiece, in its musicality as well as its nuances and messaging. My first exposure to Trá Pháidín came at their All Together Now set at midnight on the Sunday, where they explicitly said before beginning: “If you think this is going to be a trad session, you’re in the wrong place.” Their point has clearly been proven with this album.
Trá Pháidín play in The Button Factory in Dublin on Sunday, the 6th of December. Cloch’s Claí was released on September 25, 2026. For more information on physical releases and to support the band directly, visit www.trawfawdeen.bandcamp.com
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