These days, for those of us who don't live in Ireland, the once highly visible neo-traditional music that emanated from that nation during the "Celtic" enthusiasm of the 1970s and '80s is missing and missed. The Chieftains, Altan and a handful of surviving outfits carry on, but other, more recent bands rarely get heard across the ocean. Thus the Dublin-based Lankum appears welcomely with a surprising contribution of its own, one to push the music onward into a new century, even if without bodhrans and balalaikas.

Between the Earth & Sky envisions the old sounds in a novel manner sufficiently confounding that the listener's scrambled brain may translate it into something archaic. That extends to the songs, only about half of which are authentically traditional. In most cases, however, you're going to have to look at the credits to determine where a particular song comes from.

There turns out to be less distance, on one level anyway, than one would suppose between "What Will We Do When We Have No Money?" -- the often-sung lament -- and band member Ian Lynch's "Deanta in Eireann," whose melody and plot are generally familiar. Yet if you're paying close attention (and you'll have to; there are no printed lyrics), you'll pick up sentiments more nuanced and ambivalent than one encounters in 19th-century emigration ballads.

Likely, what gives Lankum's arrangements their particular quality is the band's consistent focus on pipes, concertina and harmonium, with more subtle attention paid to stringed instruments. The latter tend not to be so prominent in the arrangements as in the previous generation's efforts to take the tradition into the modern era. Lankum's vocals feel as if wafting in on a cold, distant wind that carries with it a chorus of ghosts. Actually, one cut, the oldtime "The Townie Polka," is reputed to have been learned from a ghost.

The band approaches ballads much as if they were haunted houses, in other words with appropriate respect and caution. I would not want to be driving alone, particularly late at night, while Lankum's arrangement of "The Turkish Reveille" (Child 286) is afloat in the ether. To call it otherworldly is only to describe the inescapable psychic response. I've known the ballad and its variants ("Golden Vanity," "Golden Willow Tree" and more) since my early initiation into traditional music, but I've never heard it like this. The sea that plays so fatal a role in the narrative feels like a dark vortex you may drop into and never be seen again.