LAU

The folk darlings push the envelope on their brilliant fifth album.

Since forming in 2005 this Scottish trio have earned love and acclaim in the folk community, winning Band Of The year twice at the BBC Folk Awards. each member’s a real contender in their own field, and when they get together – latterly on 2015’s superb The Bell That Never Rang – they cast their own fresh light onto their genre. Never more so than on their fifth album. With a title taken from a Seamus Heaney poem, Midnight And Closedown takes authentic folk and alloys it with a post-rock sensibility. Kris Dever’s beautiful voice imparts mournful tales of desperation (I Don’t Want To Die Here), the solace of music (She Puts On Her Headphones) and mental health. Martin Green’s accordions imbue the music with texture and his keys and electronics push into new frontiers, from the woozy bass of Toy Tigers to the kinda-Mellotron of echolalia, itself a warping, mesmerising thing that’s part John Martyn, part Sigur Rós. Aidan O’Rourke’s fiddles offer both articulate melody and rhythm, while producer John Parish (PJ Harvey) brings shape to the shifting, ambitious Return To Portland and the exotic Riad. This intelligent, truly progressive music proves again that Lau are the real deal.