Amble

One Liner: Fresh and lovely Irish folk
Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but this is folk
Home: Dublin

Poster Position: Third Quarter - Line 14
Day: Friday
Both Weekends.

Thoughts:  Oh, sign me up.  Three Irish singer-songwriters in one band named after just about the best possible walking gait?  How can you resist?  

Did you know that Amble is a coastal town on the North Sea coast in Northumberland, England?  I did not.  Also, Alf Amble was an anti-Semite from Norway.  Michele Bachmann's maiden name, too.  But this trio - Robbie Cunningham, Oisin McCaffrey, and Ross McNerney - hail from the Midlands and West of Ireland and decided to join forces to make modern folk music fun.  They just got started in 2023, but are already selling out shows and crushing it despite only a few published songs.  When they first got started, they were doing day jobs - two school teachers and one data scientist - and then got a call from a label in L.A. looking to sign them up.  Gone were the pub shows and they got down to work of becoming a proper band.

No albums yet, just two EPs - 2024's Of Land and Sea and 2024's The Commons.  So far, each of the songs is pretty simple and pure - no drums, no odd instruments, just guitars and mandolins and harmonies.  Which is excellent to hear.  I want to be in a dank Galway pub right now, hearing these three wander their way through this catalog.  Top streamer is a 2024 single that didn't make the EP - "Lonely Island" with 12.2 million streams.

Please take me there immediately to frolic on that hillside.  Damn Texas heat blasting the world into dust outside while those folks can touch green grass and dance around a fire.  I played this for the wife last night as we puttered around the kitchen preparing to go out with some friends, and she loved it too.  Although she thinks one of the singers sounds like the Crash Test Dummies guy, which I find hilarious.  "The Commons" stands out to me because of the instrumentation and the soloing at the end, and "Mary's Pub" sounds classic.  But I'm going to give you the newer single called "Schoolyard Days."  3.9 million streams.

  

I've been to Ireland once, but it is fascinating how nostalgic these tunes are making me feel, for a place I really have no right to feel a longing for.  Almost an Appalachian feel to the guitar-work there, which I guess is how that works - our hayseeds took from their hayseeds and now they're taking it back.

I think this is great.  Not sure how it will feel in a huge dusty field in a crowd, versus how amazing it would be at the Cactus Cafe or something like that, but I'd absolutely give it a shot.