Description
"Into the mouth of the wolf You're never gonna take me down. There's still a beating heart beneath the ground…"
It's easy to describe albums full of Irish-inflected punk as ?'drinking songs' and while these generous 14 rounds certainly serve that purpose, dig deeper and you find social commentary, lore and affecting storytelling. It's the complete package?—?and even the Dropkick Murphys, Boston's undisputed champions of Celtic bombast, cannot claim to have made an album this good in several long years. If that's somehow all down to you Mike Rivkees, take a bow sir. Verdict: 4/5 KERRANG
Hestia, the fifth and most recent studio album from The Rumjacks, marks a new era for the band.
Hestia takes the energy of traditional folk music, lights it on fire, then sprinkles it with ash. Dark, gritty, and historically aware, this is music grounded in the character of the Rebel.
When writing Hestia (named after the Greek goddess of home and hearth), bandmembers Mike Rivkees (vocals), Johnny McKelvey (bass), Gabe Whitbourne (guitar), Adam Kenny (bouzouki/mandolin), and Pietro Della Sala (drums) apply their diverse American, Australian, Italian, and Irish perspectives to create a new, globalized iteration of the Celtic punk legacy dating back to the Pogues, with the punk, ska, and hard rock sounds pulsing through their veins.
For twelve years, the Rumjacks have written songs that you cannot help but start singing by the second chorus, even if you have never heard them before. In this short career, they have released four acclaimed studio albums and two live albums that capture their most renowned asset: their electric energy onstage. That organic energy has garnered them a far-reaching fanbase. The band's breakthrough hit, "Irish Pub Song" (2011), a tongue-in-cheek jaunt about all the Irish pubs in the world, has over sixty-five million views on YouTube.
The band now counts hundreds of thousands of fans in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, the U.S.A, Italy, Poland, and Australia.