The Irish band here under discussion got its name from an abridged version of the ballad sometimes known as "False Lankum." On this, its third release, its title becomes the ballad's full title. I guess you'd call that a reckoning, or something.

In any event, artists on both sides of the pond are routinely billed as "folk singers" when all they do is strum acoustic guitars and confide their personal, usually romantic, struggles. At least as a point of departure, Lankum is folk music in the traditional sense -- old songs from decades or centuries ago -- but performed in arrangements that are far from the expected. When groups like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span hit the British scene around 1970, they were an effort to expand the recorded arrangements of folk material and, not incidentally, to sneak professional folk musicians onto the pop charts.

Some of the folk audience resisted that -- I remember a dinner conversation many years ago with the late Irish broadside scholar Leslie Shepard; when I mentioned the two just-cited bands, he turned pale and muttered something I didn't catch -- but many others, likely the younger ones, responded enthusiastically. And why shouldn't they have? The music was fresh and beautifully produced, and though these were far from unaccompanied songs captured in the remote countryside of another age, the bands, made up of figures rooted in the mid-century revival, carried the spirit, however reinterpreted, well into the urban 20th century.

In our time the same can be said of Lankum, though its modernist, sometimes not just electric but electronic approach can make Fairport and Steeleye feel almost quaint. (Take my word for it if you haven't heard them in a while: they sound great even now.) Still, the quartette at the heart of Lankum consists of trad veterans who have spent much of their pre- and off-time performing Irish songs in the way you'd expect to hear them if you encountered them in a club, inside a drinking establishment or on a street corner. Maybe one day they'll record an album of such. Their knowledge of the tradition is far from a passing one, definitely not a tourist's. No chestnuts here, though you will encounter the occasional obscure variant and even a Cyril Tawney or a Gordon Bok.

Meanwhile, this is very much a Lankum album, which means densely produced in part. It is, however, rather more relaxed than the others I've heard. There are solo voices, prominently that of the band's one female member, Radie Peat, who'll freeze your soul and draw tears from your eyes, and not in a way that will cause you to protest. But every working member is a gifted vocalist, solo or harmony, and the pleasures produced from the collaboration are considerable.

There is, as well, stuff that, lacking any better vocabulary to meet the occasion, I'll call white noise that dots the aural landscape. On initial encounter even the most open-minded folk listener may be taken aback. Even if you haven't heard Lankum before, though, the ear soon so bleeds it into the overall texture that it might as well be a natural feature. At some point it even begins to seem calming.

My reading tells me that Lankum's exploration of unorthodox (at least for trad songs) sounds owes to several pop bands, possibly not American, that I know nothing about and which I won't mention here out of concern that I be seen claiming -- if you will pardon the adjective -- false knowledge. What matters is that Lankum has integrated them successfully into what remains a folk recording, and one of the sort to which one can be drawn for the same reasons we are usually drawn to folk recordings: memorable stories, gorgeous melodies, a sense of connection to our shared past. As one example of how this works, "Newcastle" pulls one so deep into all of these that one may wonder for a moment if a return to the pedestrian present is possible, or even desirable.