On Fire
Black 47 is named for the darkest year of the Irish potato famine. They  are first and foremost a live pub band, and they're at their rowdy, profane best  when heard from a piss-and-Guinness-soaked stage. County Wexford-born bandleader  Larry Kirwan sympathetically addresses the sometimes radically opposed concerns  of Irish immigrants in New York and native-born Irish-Americans, keeping a wary  foot in both camps. While their economic and cultural points of reference often  part company, the two groups nonetheless share a tragic and much-brooded-over  history, a fondness for a dram downed in good company, an obsessive  preoccupation with sex, and a sense of humor so wittily self-deprecating that it  passes for satire. This live "greatest hits" package offers refueled versions of  Black 47's most blistering anticlerical and/or political rants, including "Fires  of Freedom," "American Wake," and "I Got Laid on James Joyce's Grave."--Christina Roden