They're a bit of a puzzle, Fidil.

When they're good, they're very, very good, but the same group who can send an audience away with a spring in their step with a superbly articulated march or woo them with a set of beautifully slowed barn dances can also sound as if they've left the tuning fork back in Donegal.

The three fiddlers, who manage very well without conventional accompaniment, all come from Donegal families with musical legacies and there's a pride in their home county's tradition running through their repertoire. Even the polkas they play come not from the southern counties, where there's a plentiful supply of such tunes, but from the lesser celebrated stock local to them.

Much thought goes into their arrangements. Damien McGeehan spends as much time very effectively strumming chords, plucking basslines, fingerpicking figures or using the fiddle as a bodhran as he does bowing, and their use of drones can bring the melodies splendidly into focus.

Rough around the edges doesn't begin to describe their opening set of reels, however, and the Rocky Road to Dublin, despite another fine arranging notion of three finger-style fiddles, was suggestive of craters rather than mere pot holes. And yet from there they're liable to move on to the sublime, such as Eddie O'Gara's Waltz, played with terrific harmonic delicacy and preceded with a nicely told tale of the octogenarian Eddie's revival of a whole slew of forgotten tunes as well as his libido, or the Old Wheel of Fortune set, where the potential for three fiddles to brew a stew of genuine excitement was emphatically realised.

HHH