Dara Dubh music review: Uplifting songwriting and confident rhythms

Beyond the dizzying hinterlands of Joanna Newsom, there’s still something novel about hearing a harp battle its way through an indie-pop backdrop. Dara Dubh is an interesting proposition, then, placing her folk-tinged harp-playing at the centre of a maelstrom of traditional rock, and melding genres to create glisteningly optimistic numbers about growing up and finding your place in the world. 

Opening with expansive jam session ‘Chrysalis’, the Northern Irish-born Edinburgh-based Dubh almost immediately cements herself as a performer happy to share a stage, giving her bandmates the best lines while her harp maintains a confident rhythm. She’s a leader without an ego, ushering a flurry of special guests (a bit of a who’s who for anyone familiar with Edinburgh’s grassroots music scene) and cheerfully detailing ‘Belfast Mona Lisa’, a Housemartins-adjacent jaunt co-written with her mum. 

But the harp is the lynchpin here, whether soaringly cinematic on the drum & bass-tinged ‘Void’, intricately jazzy on ‘Miles Above’, or stomping through the poppy closing number ‘Where Do You Go?’ Her lyrics are similarly limber whilst remaining almost unassailably sunny, as in gig-centrepiece ‘Bubble Town’, a spoken word narrative about leaving a small town for the big city that’s sprinkled with nuance, charm and an edge of relatability.

At the gig’s close, Dubh pulled out a sheet of paper with her ‘to dos’ for 2024: one was to release her EP (tick) and another to headline Sneaky Pete’s (tick). It was a typically winning flourish to cap off an hour of promising, uplifting songwriting. 

Dara Dubh reviewed at Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh.