Dervish: Midsummer's Night (Whirling Discs)

I wasn't exactly expecting a style revolution from this solid Sligo-based outfit, but with two new fiddlers (Seamus O'Dowd and Tom Morrow) there's more brightness to the crisp, propulsive dance sets: Shane Mitchell's personable accordion wheeze; Liam Kelly's flute scatter on a Gurteen reel; and the fiddles with, I suspect, O'Dowd's in the wilder, scratchier, older idiom; over the crunching off-beats of Michael Holmes' bouzouki and Brian McDonough's winkle-picking mandolins. Cathy Jordan's songs are nicely sourced, with a drowsier, bluesier feel nowadays to her beautifully ornamented tinker's lilt; and the belt she gets out of Bould Doherty makes for an angry, rowling pleasure.

- Mic Moroney

Michael O'Duffy: The Golden Voice of Ireland (Pulse Records)

Whiplash into the past with this stirring, once-famous Derry-born crooner; the bleached brogue and Count-John high tenor tackling the Fenian toast of Rising of the Moon, The Kerry Dances, etc; and ould humours like One-Eyed Riley and Leprechaun Lullaby - all spread over lush, twinkly, green-spangled American orchestration, or chilly Hammond organ, like something from the ballroom in The Shining. You wouldn't recognise your Lovely Derry, Green Glens of Antrim, or house prices in Ballyjamesduff from this dead, parallel universe of rosy-cheeked colleens and old companions. But if you're caught between emotion and excruciation - as Anthony Clare once said of Christmas-haters - you probably had an unhappy childhood.

- Mic Moroney