Rating: 9.5/10
Release: 17 March 2023
Label: Independent

I must be dreaming. Firkin has taken some time from touring to duck into a recording studio!
Their last recording, “Into the Night”, was an amazing EP that lives on one of my regular
playlists, so I was excited to get my hands on their new, full-length album.
For the unfamiliar folks, Firkin is a celtic-themed folk metal band from Hungary with an
impressive history of touring the festivals of central Europe. These folks stay lovingly close to
their genre target: an electric guitar and punky drums are met with a tin whistle and fiddle (one
track has a bagpipe!), and to earn their extra credit, this album also has three familiar celtic
songs: Donald Macgillavry, Step It Out Mary, and Finnegan’s Wake.
I’ll start out by addressing the elephant in the room: traditional music purists are probably not
going to be replacing their cherished recordings with these. The lyrics are simplified, the vocalist
requires some getting used to, and common, traditional arrangements are thrown to the
wayside. “Step It Out Mary” is an especially strange choice: a traditionally somber song about a
suicide shouldn’t have me tapping my toes.
With that said: the covers rock. They rock hard. “Donald Macgillivray” is modernized, and the
latter third of the song has an improved melody that really picks the song up and carries it.
Finnegan’s Wake gets a kind of jazzy intro and then just absolutely crashes into a great metal
song. I wish the tempo were a bit faster, but anything lacking in speed is made up for with
intensity. It’s a great rush.
Enough about the covers. What they’re bringing to the album– and it’s a lot– can be put in three
basic categories: bangers, anthems, and oddities. Their meat and potatoes are songs like
“Drunken Angel’s Club”, which is a great intro to the album because it showcases where they
excel. It’s vocal-driven with punchy percussion and an appearance by the tin whistle and fiddle.
Same can be said for “Still Alive”, “Stir It Up”, and “Ticktack”. I confess that I’m not sure what
“Ticktack” was about, but it’s very danceable.
“Stir It Up” is the name of the album, and it’s good. While demonstrative of their work, it’s not
like the two absolute gems of the album: “For a Life” (which they also released as a single– and
the bassline punches hard) and “Boys Are on the Loose”. These are the anthems, the kickass
rock songs that stand by themselves. Firkin knew this, too, because the latter is the last song on
the album.
Lastly, there are the oddities, and I say this in a loving sense. “Santiana” is a modern sea
shanty. It starts with some nautical sounds, of course, and borrows some melody from “Whup
Jamboree” (another traditional song that Firkin previously covered). There are a host of famous
pirate metal bands that could comfortably cover this, and it’d sound right at home. “Haiku” is the
album’s only instrumental song, and it’s fantastic. It has eight-bar stretches that could,
themselves, be a standalone Irish reel.

Tracklist

1. The Drunken Angel Club
2. Santiana
3. Donald Macgillavry
4. Step It Out Mary
5. Still Alive
6. Ticktack
7. Haiku
8. How We Love
9. For A Life
10. Finnegans Wake
11. Stir It Up
12. The Boys Are On The Loose