30/05/2008
Reviews for live album

BBC Folk Website
Lau Live
Navigator 4 | Artist website
Beautifully-recorded December 2007 gig captures the wild and discordant, subtle and sublime playing and gripping songs (3 here) of this outrageously inventive trio. Intense and uplifting.




The Guardian
Robin Denselow
Friday May 9, 2008
Lau Live
**** (Four Stars)
The "live album" is something of a pop-music oddity. Often, it's a useful device by which a band can fulfil their contractual obligations to a record company without doing too much in the way of extra work. But that's not the case for Lau: this is a band who are even better heard live than in the confines of a recording studio, simply because their semi-improvised, freewheeling playing changes with each performance. It was no surprise that they won best group at this year's Radio 2 Folk awards, but they should have won best live act as well, as this set proves. The Scottish-English trio are unique in the folk scene for their self-written jigs, reels and complex instrumental work, and for the way they can repeatedly switch mood and direction within a song. The interplay between Martin Green on accordion, Aidan O'Rourke on fiddle and Kris Drever on guitar and lyrics seems almost intuitive. Recorded in Edinburgh, this is an exhilarating and subtle set that shows why Lau are so special.

The Scotsman
LAU: LIVE
**** (Four Stars)
Lau have just finished a Tune Up tour that roamed Scotland to great
acclaim, and this album recorded at Edinburgh's Bongo Club last December
underlines why many people see them as the band of the moment on the
Scottish folk scene. The trio of fiddler Aidan O'Rourke, accordionist
Martin Green and guitarist Kris Drever are evolving an empathic and
exploratory approach to their music that pushes aside established
conventions in favour of creative, genre-bursting exploration. There is
an eclectic musical sensibility at work here that sees them taking
mainly self-composed traditional-style tunes in some very unexpected
directions, a point established in the opening set, Stewarts, which
begins innocently enough, then takes off in distinctly anarchic fashion.
That combination of traditional roots with openness to experiment recurs
throughout a scintillating disc.



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