Welcome To The Hotel Connemara

Frankie Gavin and Alec Finn have been around the block more than a couple of times now, and they've seduced a rake of unlikely apostles with their high octane mix of the old and the new. The release of last year's best of, How The West Was Won, was a magnificent resume of their antics from then to now.

This year's model is an entirely different affair. Tongues firmly planted in their collective cheek, they make more like Joe Walsh than Don Henley with their Eagles-esque moniker. Only thing is: Welcome To The Hotel Connemara is no Hotel California, and it's doubtful whether Connemara will be ricocheting across the airwaves for even a fraction as long as its mock progenitor.

Alec, Mairtin and the boys have never been short of rock 'n' roll credentials. Playing house band to the Stones is but a mere glimpse into their hobnobbing diary. But Hotel Connemara is no Let It Bleed (or Tattoo You even). This is a collection that'll be more at home in elevators the length and breadth of North America than in true believers' CD racks.

The track listing is, hmmm, interesting. Kicking off with 'River Deep Mountain High', you brace yourself for some serious kickass rhythm 'n' trad. Instead you get muzak of the kind that would've been hard pressed to make it on to the Rose of Tralee stage back in the heady seventies.

And from there on, it's all downhill. The flute intro to Gary Moore's 'Parisian Walkways' utterly emasculates what used to be one of the most sensual and erotic pieces of music ever written.

The pairing of 'The Sally Gardens' and 'Lay Down Sally' might work at a titular level, but what it gains in name it lacks completely in spirit or spunk.

Of course their seminal reworking of 'Hey Jude' is as crystalline and effervescent as ever, and their fluid arrangement of 'Love Hurts' is a pleasing bauble. But place these tracks amid the mouldy company of 'Whiter Shade Of Pale', 'Only The Lonely' and the truly execrable 'The Rocks of Bawn/Take It To The Limit', and what you're left with is a blue rinse take on all things supposedly r 'n' r. Rest and recreation it might be, if you're under doctor's orders to keep your entertainment strictly prozac'd. If it's anything stronger you're after though, I'd stick to the band's magnificent back catalogue.