As a few pink clouds materialized on the horizon line, The Alehounds vocalist Sean Conlon leaned forward, placing one hand on his guitar as the other dropped to his side. On banjo, Rob Blaney followed suit, letting the instrument take a momentary rest. To Conlon’s left, fiddler Dan Foster joined in, sans fiddle.
“Ooooo, there’s whiskey in the barrel …” Conlon sang, a smile creeping onto his face as the audience began to clap along in not-quite rhythm. The sun ratcheted down another tiny notch. A young boy ran over to them from his place in the grass and began to dance a freestyle jig. Conlon leaned into the microphone, and gave him reason to keep dancing.
Wednesday night, Conlon and bandmates set a relaxed and upbeat tempo for the New Haven Museum’s first Twilight Concert of the season, held outdoors at the historic Pardee-Morris House on Lighthouse Road. About 60 people showed up for the two-hour event, which promised “traditional Irish folk and Americana with just a hint of rock and roll.”
Lucy Gellman Photo
After a reconfiguration last year — The Alehounds have shrunk from five members down to the current three — the trio delivered something like that, covering popular works by The Dubliners and their ilk as the evening grew cool and the sun sank into the water. Conlon, Blaney and Foster are what you want for a lazy evening sprawled out on the long grass of a historic home, where the greatest concern is not international terrorism or fissures in local government, but the paucity of whiskey close at hand. Carrying vocals, Conlon has adopted a sort of bumbling Irish brogue that meets up with the sandpaper-throated style popularized — regrettably or wonderfully, depending on what type of listener you might be — by Marcus Mumford in 2010 or 2011. Blaney plunks away delightfully.
The Alehounds’ hidden weapon is Foster, whose fiddly musings are good enough to situate an imaginative listener in a dank Dingle bar, a frothy pint of Murphy’s in hand. It was his playing that enveloped and enthralled, bringing a few, brave young dancers to the front of the lawn while attendees looked on grinning. No one had brought Murphy’s, or even Guinness. But a few opened their picnic baskets and coolers to bring out bottles of wine. They didn’t need to be anywhere but New Haven. There, where they could lift their plastic cups to him, was enough.
