Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

A lot of people think that Irish music begins and ends with U2. This is unfortunate; it insinuates that Irish musicians can't carry a tune and spend all of their time making nuisances of themselves engaging in besotted diatribes about third world debt forgiveness. Not so. Nor does all Irish music begin and end with a jig. There is joy and sadness, humor and pathos, pride and regret in Irish music. There are groups besides The Chieftains who carry the traditions on as well. One of the m is Altan.

My good buddy F. Patrick Flanagan, student of all things Irish, knows who Altan is. They are not exactly a household name outside of the clans, but that should change with the release of THE BLUE IDOL. These are songs that will break your heart in a minute, and stun your soul for all eternity. The musicianship is exquisite, and the vocals of Maihread Ni Mhaonaigh (try running that name through your spellchecker!) sound as if she is channeling Sandy Denny. I am in love with and married to a stunningly beautiful tall Swede who is more than I will ever deserve and I would never leave her but when I hear Maihread sing "Daily Growing," about a woman in an arranged marriage to a man half of her age, she's barely through the first verse before I'm ready to saddle up the stallion, strap on the crossbow, and gallop across the leigh or whatever it is they call the fields over there to storm the barricades and carry her off. Oh yeah, you'll never believe who else is on here. Dolly Parton. Yeah. That Dolly Parton, on the "The Pretty Young Girl." Put those two women in front of a microphone and time stops. Each silence drops through the pauses like a stone down a bottomless well.

And instrumentally? These guys kick ass. There's no other way to put it. There are fiddles and pipes and time signature changes on tracks like "The Gatehouse Maid/The Ashplant/The Trip to Cullenstown" that leave Led Zep in the dust. Then there's "Cuach mo Lon Dubh Bui" which has a familiar melody --- "Matty Groves" by Fairport Convention (and, for all I know, it IS "Matty Groves"--- except...except...they've got a sax smokin' along behind it, and it works. I mean to tell you, it works. Every note on here is flawlessly played, flawlessly recorded. It doesn't get any better than this. What is really great is that as you listen to these tracks you can catch certain cadences that somehow found their way into Cajun and Zydeco music, and even into rock. THE BLUE IDOL is like an aural Rosetta Stone of popular music.

Check this thing out. Fall in love and get your heart broken and get over it, all within 60 minutes or so. You'll do it again and again.