I’ve perhaps over-anticipated this release. Since being floored by them playing live last summer, and then squeezing every last drop out of their fine promo EP on Reveal, I’ve thought Lau were just the adrenalin shot needed. Beyond the realms of technical, traditional music literacy, the trio displays a delicious propensity for danger and boundary pushing – and all with a disarming glint in their eyes.

Live, they tease and hook. Edinburgh based accordionist Martin Green, West Highland’s fiddler Aidan O’Rourke and Orcadian singer/guitarist Kris Drever – all mighty players and in-their-own-right innovators – take the audience on an immense roller-coaster ride: one moment gliding along an exquisitely painful melody line and, the next swept up by brooding waves of musical muscle and then plunged headfirst into ADHD free-jazz improvisation.

And, hot-dang, its in stereo-literate form. Lightweights and Gentlemen is exciting and visceral from the onset. Hinba is a monster opening track. Obviously orchestrated but still free, it toys with rhythm, texture and harmony; tensely minor chords and driving melodic lines restlessly building to a comically deconstructed finale. But this isn’t just contrived experimental post-modernist jiggery.
The mix may be ever shifting but there is a bedrock of a consistent collective musical luminance. Aidan, Scots Trad Music Awards Instrumentalist of the Year 2006, is a gifted player: his is a pure mellifluous style, easily conjuring up wild and windswept highland imagery. Martin, meanwhile, is potentially the Garth Hudson of the operation – inspired yet slightly unhinged. His tangy tunesmithery and larger-than-life sound are unique and wonderful. And, here, Kris (BBC Radio 2 Mr Horizon Award 2007) confirms what we’ve come to expect of him – singing understated yet devastating songs from the dark side, and providing gilded guitar picking and rhythmic drive.

Balancing those frenzied hi-octane moments are those of aching beauty. The melodic swell of Kris’s and Gallowhill literarily hurt. Kris’s telling of The Unquiet Grave, underpinned by O’Rourke’s gorgeously dulcet-toned fiddle, and sumptuous, expansive bass chords from Green is exquisite. Tune set The Jigs is superbly crafted, and the Butcher Boy a slayer.

So much for over anticipation. This is, in March, album of the year.