Wonderful music from Ireland's lads!!
If you love those irish lilts with horns, pipes and fiddle, you will love these fellows! The music is very moving - whether happy or melancholy! I heard them in person on Saint patty's Day and it was a real treat! I highly recommend them!

A perfect album from start to finish
I think you'd be hard pressed to find an album with fewer flaws than Otherworld. Lunasa really delivers on this album and, with the addition of the flute playing Kevin Crawford, really define a modern sound that takes Irish traditional music into the next century.

Traditionalists might gripe about the use of the bass, but I think it really adds depth to the tunes.

If you're either a seasoned veteran or a new fan of Irish traditional music, you'd be doing yourself a huge favor by picking up this album.

Electrifying Not Electric
Attempts to drag Irish music into the modern world have regularly involved the welding of heavily-amplified instruments and punk sensibilities onto traditional songs and tunes. The results have often been irksome. In saying that Lunasa play Irish music in a contemporary style, it shouldn't be feared that here is another "weld job".

For a start this Irish quintet boasts some award winning traditional musicians, including fiddler Sean Smyth and flute player Kevin Crawford. Yes there is bass, but it comes in the form of upright (double) bass from former Waterboys member Trevor Hutchinson. His thrumming, highly syncopated style adds a unique flavour to the band. But rhythm seems to exude from them all, whether the percussive acoustic guitar of Donogh Hennessy, the flitting flute of Kevin Crawford or the driving uilleann pipes and whistles of guests John McSherry or Mike McGoldrick.

While fast jigs, reels and hornpipes predominate, contrast is provided by some sweet slow airs and the occasional clever tempo variation within tunes. "Otherworld" offers an outstanding selection of instrumental Irish music that pulsates with life - electrifying without being electric.

Enjoyable and Listenable
Two summers ago, my wife and I rented a summer house in County Kerry, along the shore of the Iveragh peninsula. Of course, that meant that we had to eat many meals and drink many glasses of stout (my wife) and shots of Jameson's (me) in the local bars while we listened to local musicians and danced to them as well.

Neither of us were aficionados of Irish music until then. Coming from California, I equated 'Irish' music with the local "Celtic" groups at home that played a limpid New Age/folk pap --short on substance and no muscle at all --Ireland via Windham Hill, if you were.

A month in Ireland changed all that. In the pubs, we heard live, muscular music --it was energizing and great fun. We began experimenting with contemporary Irish recorded music --Christie Moore first, Hammy Hamilton, Con O'Drisceoll and Seamus Creigh, Mary Black (whom we heard live on our last night in Ireland), and, my favorite, KILA.

I left Ireland hooked on the music. Recently, I ordered three more albums by contemporary Irish groups: KILA: Lemonade and Buns --out of circulation, alas!; Lunasa: Otherworlds; and Sharon Shannon: Live in Galway.

In both Sharon Shannon's album and this one by Lunasa, I appreciate the verve that the musicians bring to the songs as well as the exceptionally high level of musical talent.


Lunasa is more adventurous and musically more diverse than Sharon Shannon, blending wood flute, guitar, bass or strings, and (occasionally) pipes. The best of the songs on this album--'Goodbye Miss Goodovich,' 'The Floating Crowbar'-- are exceptional music and every cut on this fine album pleases the ear. Sharon Shannon and her colleagues are more traditional but equally virtuosic. They provide first-rate foot-tapping versions of traditional Irish music.

If I were to differentiate among them, I would say that Lunasa and KILA are the groups I would most like to listen to on my iPod, and Sharon Shannon's is the group I'd hire if I were hosting a dance or party.

Lunasa is outstanding music. It satisfied me both intellectually and viscerally. Why isn't most American pop music as satisfying?

David Keymer
Modesto CA

I cant believe my ears
omg. I love all styles of music. Especially screamo and hardcore. But wow. This music
It touches you. I am going to get all the hardcore kids at my school hooked on this music. wow.