Irish folk merchants Madra Salach delivered on the promise of their excellent debut EP with an evening of age-old songcraft and atmospheric experimentalism, adept at finding beauty in the midst of adversity.

Saturday night is party night in Newcastle. Around Central Station, it’s easy to guess tonight’s arena headliner by the endless t-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘WEST LIFE’ making their way down to the Utilita. Even inside the Grove across town in Byker, the atmosphere is merry, patrons swaying woozily to outstanding folk-rock support act Little Grandad. But Madra Salach don’t really do party anthems. “I hope you’re ready for some sad songs about… emigration,” frontman Paul Banks tells us apologetically, clearly enjoying the bawdy cheers and unintelligible Geordie heckles that come back his way.

As Banks will say with not a hint of arrogance later on, folk is having a moment right now, especially Irish folk, with Madra Salach emerging in the wake of trail-blazing experimental compatriots Lankum, as well as John Francis Flynn and Ye Vagabonds. Banks’ disaffected vocal style and way of hanging both hands off the microphone stand calls to mind Ireland’s reigning rockstar Grian Chatten, at least until you hear him belt on something like Searrach with a hair-raising punky belt even the esteemed Fontaines D.C. frontman couldn’t manage.

Whilst Madra Salach deal largely in earnestly delivered traditional numbers complete with mandolin and harmonium, it’s their experimental forays into ambient and electronic music tonight that makes them so exciting. I Was Just A Boy decomposes into a hellish dirge strewn with razor wire synth for its enthralling final minutes. The Pogues’ Turkish Song of the Damned is given new layers of dense guitar-driven murk under that eery mandolin melody. Minimalist Murphy Can Never Go Home provides a vital moment of levity amidst the tumult, Banks movingly delivering the tale of an Irishman forced to leave his family behind to make a living in England. It’s given extra resonance by the fact that Banks and co are, to some extent, living the song themselves for this UK tour. When he later says they need to sell more merch to afford their flight home, you’re inclined to take him at his word.

It’s a shame the Grove’s lighting engineer seems to take a night off tonight, bathing Madra Salach in murky red for the entire hour, and the fact that five out of six band members are sat down studiously working their way through each song makes some of the band’s more fiery numbers – mosh-worthy Ribbon Factory or anthemic Cranes, for instance – feel a little static.

It’s unusual for a band’s calling card to be a 9-minute meditative drone piece, but such is the case with Madra Salach, who close with The Man Who Seeks Pleasure. It’s a counter-intuitive fan favourite until you actually hear it in the flesh. Banks patiently teases out one poetic lyric after another, the band rising steadily like a tide towards an awesome, gasp-inducing crescendo. Underscoring it all is the grounding presence of Maxime Arnold’s harmonium drone, which offers the same otherworldly ambience of a shruti box or sitar used in Indian spiritual music. The sound is soothing on a cellular level. If there’s anything that can still the rowdy Saturday night crowd in Newcastle, it’s this. “The man who seeks pleasure is the man who seeks pain,” Banks repeats with increasing anguish, pointing the mic at the crowd for us to bellow it back at him. It’s an apt summary of Madra Salach’s appeal, and adversity-driven Irish folk in general. This music is painful, true, but what a pleasure it is too.

Enjoyed this post? Click here to support Undertone.