Talisk are a Scottish band who came to my attention via a folk music feed I subscribe to. Dawn is their third album since forming in 2016, and adds Benedict Morris on fiddle and other strings, who replaced the departing Haley Keenan.

Most of the music I review on this website is, of course, progressive rock, but modern folk music is an important part of my musical life. For followers of this site examining a band whose three members play concertina, fiddle, and acoustic guitar, you might be expecting some sort of cosy sat by the fireside traditional wishy-washy stuff, but look and hear beyond the stereotype, because this album presents the listener with a very complex set of songs which, whilst undoubtedly in the folk tradition, also have some very strong progressive sensibilities. This is an album which is strikingly modern and a thoroughly enjoyable journey. Indeed, it is easy to see why they are so highly regarded in the modern folk music world and have several awards to their name.

I have embedded a couple of videos below. Marvel, if you would, at the use of the humble concertina as you have never heard it before. Placed in the hands of Mohsen Amini, it is with a musical genius, and the complex sections he produces are nothing short of exceptional. Completing the line up on guitar is Graeme Armstrong, and a fine player he is, too.

The album is an instrumental, with the use of voices in places. The challenge, as ever, for an instrumental album is whether it can tell a story without words and fire the imagination. Dawn succeeds on every level. From the very short, and very evocative, Intro, to the second and final part of Dystopia, this is a fine story. When the intro is completed, the album bursts into noise with Aura. The guitar is beautiful and reminds me in parts of a certain Mr Anthony Phillips. When the concertina is introduced, you hear what I mean about the complexity of the sounds produced. On this, as on all tracks, the instruments combine wonderfully to create, well, an aura, which at times is very much a wall of sound washing over you.

It sets the tone for all that follows. Three minutes in there is such a lovely guitar line accompanied by a delicate string before the concertina comes back in, and when I listen to this, I am cheered up, I am happy, and there can be no finer descriptor for music, can there?

Surya is a Hindi word translated as “sun” and is a fine title for a track which evokes the lovely album cover with the star rising above the horizon of the stark lochs. Added to the lush strings of Morris are some synths which soar. I love this track, because it talks to me loudly of renewal and the freshness of the new day, and there is a frenetic energy to much of it which brings you that feeling. Truly wonderful.

The Light of Day continues this theme. The opening section has a lovely acoustic guitar solo before the fiddle and concertina join to create an evocative section which is overlaid by some more sensitive synth sounds. As the track progresses, the concertina again takes centre stage before just short of three minutes in, the track comes to a gradual slowdown with a particularly fine duet between guitar and strings. The piece expands very nicely and features some loud drum crashes before it closes. The final few seconds has a nice orchestral feel to it.

Lava is another lively piece with concertina at the fore backed by some racy guitar and percussions. This track is also noteworthy with the introduction of voices which chant alongside the main chords, and this is a good effect. When the guitar is provided with the centre stage, there is a delicious passage which recalls some of Mike Oldfield’s finest Celtic-influenced work, such as Voyager.

The album is then provided with a natural break in proceedings with an Interlude, a couple of minutes of pure progressive folk. The string chords which lead this are delicate and thoughtful and they are accompanied by similar keyboard interspersions.   

The second half of the album begins with a personal favourite of mine, Storm. Scotland can be a harsh mistress. Whilst where I live in West Wales is the perfect dairy country, owing to an abundance of rain, we tend not to get here the Atlantic storms which crash into Scotland with frequency, and this track provides a perfect musical accompaniment to such an event, with the band rather cleverly at the opening segment providing us with the “calm before the event”, and the event commences just short of two minutes in, with a frenetic passage of music which conjures perfectly the weather hitting the shore and populace. What follows is a folk-rock piece of music which, in my opinion, is comparable to much of what was featured on, for example, Tull’s Stormwatch, excepting here we have strings as opposed to flute providing us with the lead.

Beast opens with some dark and mysterious keyboards before the track progresses into a more familiar concertina and string led jingle. However, when this calms down just short of two minutes in, we get another extremely thoughtful and delicate passage of music with the strings, especially, crying out to us. When the track reasserts itself three minutes in, it is intensive stuff, and always enjoyable.

The album closes with Dystopia, which is split into two distinct parts. There are many, and I am one of them, who fear that our society is in danger of descending into a dystopian nightmare given the shocking standard of leadership and the danger of populist fantasy which abounds. Whether the intent of this track is to portray such a descent, I do not know. I think it is, though. Part One of the track is deeply thoughtful and has at its core a fragile fiddle lead which cries out to us as if to mourn the state we find ourselves in, and even when the pace picks up, it is very much in a darker key than much of what preceded it on the album. The second part is intriguing, with the use of the guitar as a sole rhythm section particularly fascinating to these ears. The fiddle solo is, again, particularly sad, but underneath that the guitar, concertina, drum, and synth create a particularly angry undertow, and the final minute then sees the band rock out as if to hammer home the end of normality in society as we know it.

This is a fine album. I think that it will appeal to those of you who enjoyed the Kaprekar’s Constant release this year, which I reviewed a few weeks back, and the more Celtic inspired passages which frequent, for example, the music of Oldfield, Karnataka, Three Colours Dark, and Mostly Autumn.

It’s folk, Jim, but not as we know it. Get onto their Bandcamp page and let an energetic trio wash all over you. https://talisk.bandcamp.com/album/dawn