(this is what happens when I forget to press "publish")
When I recently picked up SuidAkrA's latest album, Eternal Defiance, I was absolutely blown away by its bonus track, a cover of the old Irish folk song "Mrs McGrath."
I know I often (jokingly) give the Irish a bunch of flak for being
often confused with them (Scottish descent here), but there are so many
things I've got to respect about them and their culture; hugely among
these is their folk music. There's so much of it that's been preserved
and passed down, and it's all SO GOOD. And even as it goes into modern
day, with new techniques and styles of musical performance, we're seeing
quite a few of them turned into rock and metal songs. I'm okay with
this. You may've heard Thin Lizzy's rock cover of the old Irish folk song, "Whisky in the Jar," which was later used as the base for a further cover by Metallica (with its video which is hilariously mismatched with the song... they're singing a tale about a highwayman taking revenge on his woman's lover, and we get... a sorority party?! lolwut). I know, the Dubliners and Grateful Dead also
released their own versions as well, but I'm not really counting them here as
theirs were closer to the original folk style. Point is, Irish folk and rock/metal are two styles which somehow tend to go
really well together.
Anyways, let's get to the song that this post is actually about:
The plot of "Mrs McGrath" is about an older widow who sends her son off to fight in what's widely believed to be the Napoleonic Wars, and upon his return, she is in shock and denial seeing the injuries he sustained. A really touching song definitely, and this band did an incredible job of putting the proper emotional "punch" into it. The song starts out slow, but picks EXACTLY the right timing to abruptly pick up in intensity (around the 2:35 mark, right after the mother gives an unsympathetic "Why didn't you run from the cannonball?"). That spot sets off the goosebumps every time.
Now we can't deny other modern versions of this song. Bruce Springsteen did an amazing rendition a few years back, which was decently faithful to the original and which the SuidAkrA version seems to build off of, though Springsteen's Americanisms and accent do throw off the effect somewhat. And then there was the Dubliners' version, which, while properly Irish, is almost offensively upbeat and sounds nothing like the traditional version. The SuiAkrA version strikes just the right balance of authenticity, originality, and intensity.
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