Review: The Langan Band, The Jam Jar – ‘All bruised romance and atheist prayers’

For most bands the pandemic was a nightmare. It stopped tours, drained possibilities, put plans on hold for two years but seemed like much longer.

Two years, though, is nothing to festival favourites, The Langan Band. Their debut album came out in 2013. Their second came out two weeks ago.

Various personal difficulties delayed recordings but playing live has always been what The Langan Band are all about and Bristol’s The Jam Jar is a favourite place, almost a home from home.

They gave themselves two songs to warm up, to flex muscles. One a Balkan banger, full of light and shade, a stately waltz one minute, an impassioned stomp the next.

The second, Oh Mary Don’t You Weep, had the double bass creating a sway that pulsed through the, already busy, dancefloor.

John Langan sounding for all the world like a slurred Scottish Tom Waits, all bruised romance and atheist prayers.

With Alastair Caplin’s fiddle bow gently smoking and the double bass of Dave Tunstall finding its groove, The Langan Band unveil their new album in full.

Plight o’ Sheep‘ is already one of the greatest albums of 2023, it is an absolutely storming thing, as good an album of contemporary, festival flavoured Folk as you’ll find.

They play every track, in order, from start to finish.

Playing a whole album like that, of course, is a bit risky. Where you can get away with a couple of slower ones on a record, live the pace needs to remain high.

Especially when the crowd is as noisy, as boisterous as this one. Which is a massive shame really because both Sweetness and Open Your Eyes are heartfelt and gorgeous, both unleashing a massive emotional cascade.

At least they would were it not for incessant bar-chat.

Sweetness sees Langan pouring out his heart while Alastair Caplin softly picks out a lovely melody on his fiddle. The tune builds, increasingly full of a simple, uncomplicated love until your heart is fit to burst.

Langan’s voice on Open Your Eyes is wonderfully expressive, sitting in a bed of entwined fiddle and bowed double bass. Slowly, steadily it reaches a huge, swirling cathartic percussive pummelling.

Astonishingly the idiots at the bar chat on.

In all honesty the chatter-ers have come for one thing, and one thing only. They have come to dance.

Having honed their craft at countless festivals over the years The Langan Band know exactly how to turn a dancefloor into a seething, whirling mass.

Romani anthem Djelem Djelem swells with such passion and yearning, it is the slow stamp around a campfire and gears up into something really powerful, it inspires twirling across the whole room.

As it morphs into The Drunken Dwarf, as Caplin wrings every last drop out of his fiddle, it’s a miracle that it doesn’t catch fire. Starting fast, becoming faster and then faster still, the audience are delirious, momentarily silenced.

If dancing is what’s needed then Come When I Call You delivers; fiddle, guitar and double bass lifting feet into the air with ease.

Leg of Lamb is a vengeance filled monster, the sound of an insanely debauched Viking dining hall, it is darkly humorous and infectiously danceable.

Caplin’s fiddle on Bastard Hills of Totterdown traces weaving, drunken, desperate footsteps against a fantastic piece of furious Scottish storytelling. All three threaten to create total mayhem.

Mayhem, however, is not that far away. Old Tom’s Waltz/Reel Valencia is the finest track on a brilliant album and is the hand grenade that waits right at the end.

Tunstall’s massive bull-frog bass croak complements Caplin’s delicate melody, the three of them adding a Hellfire chant as the inevitable madness lurks at the corners of the song.

And then, as predicted, the roof is blasted clean off. Ridiculously fast clapping doesn’t remotely keep pace with Caplin’s fiddle, Tunstall’s bass has a gunshot snap and Langan sits, hunched over his guitar, mischievously stirring up the wildness.

The dancers become dervishes; the only sound are whoops of joy. The years forgotten; the talking ceased.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: Jon Wilks, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘A master of digression and an open-er of worlds’
• Review: Krooked Tongue, Dareshack – ‘A magnetic trio’
• Review; Rachael Chinouriri, Strange Brew – ‘She had the audience in the palm of her hand’

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