Lorkin O’Reilly – Marriage Material
Team Love Records – 2021
I first encountered Lorkin O’Reilly as the support to Gruff Rhys in Vancouver on October 19th, 2018. Touring with Rhys on the back of his 2018 full-length debut, Heaven Depends (Team Love Records), armed with just an acoustic guitar, O’Reilly held the indie rock veteran’s audience rapt with a set of hushed intensity, emphasizing a powerful lyric – of which there were several – with a piercing stare into the crowd. It was a truly captivating performance, even more so the following year in the intimacy of a café setting in my town, when O’Reilly was on a short West Coast run with his Portland, OR-based labelmate, Darci Phenix.
The beautiful chamber-folk of Heaven Depends rightly drew comparisons with Nick Drake, Dick Gaughan, Townes Van Zandt, Damien Jurado, Bert Jansch, and the acoustic aspect of Sufjan Stevens but concerning the equally exquisite Marriage Material Iron & Wine/Sam Beam should be added to those touchstones. On this second album, the 27-year-old Scot of Irish heritage really opens up as a lyricist, delivering some of the most powerfully raw emotions in song form I’ve heard in many years.
Despite the self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek sleeve image of an unconscious O’Reilly face down on a bed, the self-produced Marriage Material is as personal a collection of songs as you’ll encounter this or any other year, dealing as it does with such as the dissolution of his marriage (Still You / Twist / Mulberry Bush), and an uncle who was imprisoned for murder (Allan). This said, while remaining expressly personal, it’s not all downbeat or melancholy fare. O’Reilly is a skilled, thoughtful lyricist, here also exploring (in his own words) “feelings of insignificance and triviality” in life’s grand scheme (Napoleon Complex); the giddiness of a new relationship (Cacti); the challenges of an immigrant’s assimilation into an alien environment (Baby Steps: O’Reilly relocated to Catskill, NY, as an 18-year-old) and, the album having been partly composed last year, quarantine routines (Pelé Pelé). Of the latter, O’Reilly says:
“One of my rituals during quarantine was to take long baths in the evening and watch YouTube highlights of old soccer games… I find sports really fascinating. These men and women, dressed in beautiful matching outfits with Marvel-esque physiques are effectively superheroes in all but a cape. They unite countries, cities and families. We applaud their genius when they succeed and shout and curse when they fail. I enjoyed the juxtaposition between superhero and man in the bath feeling self-conscious about his weight.”
As I said, thoughtful – and idiosyncratic – and I cannot heap enough praise upon O’Reilly’s nimble, intriguing wordplay. For example, take the first two verses of Napoleon Complex, a song presenting excerpted random streams of thought, whereupon the harrowing crashes headlong into the whimsical:
Sometimes at night when I’m lying on my own / My mind goes places it doesn’t normally go / I think of Hiroshima and all those kids just dying alone / And the guy who named the bomb ‘Little Boy.’
What was it like on Napoleon’s boat? / And did they actually fight in those ridiculous clothes? / Imagine the hassle trying to keep those washed / I bet I’d be the boy with the cleaning job
O’Reilly’s lyrics are also frequently cosily nostalgic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, such as in the delightful Big Silly Heart, a song providing a moment of levity in a largely introspective collection:
Then I met Clare at a High School rave / She gave me beer and MDMA / And all I did was talk about Led Zeppelin // I gave it a week and left her a call / But she told me that she’d moved to Gibraltar / A classic rock pun I guess
Besides the ubiquitous Zep, on what other album could you find mentions of Mohamed Salah, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Bukowski, Tony Hawk, Blaze Foley and, yes indeed, The Weakest Link. Such is the depth of O’Reilly’s well of wistful, sentimental, and hazily romantic memories and musings that he can detail such vivid lyrical imagery at just 27. Imagine what he’ll be capable of in his forties and beyond, with so much more life lived.
Delivered in a pleasingly raspy, soft voice over sparse acoustic instrumentation, these lovely, gentle, often brutally honest songs make for an engaging and emotionally immersive listen. To bring them to life, he assembled a talented small crew of accomplices: bass duties are courtesy of Sam Smith – no, not that one – (Pelé Pelé), Kenny Siegal (Allan, also drums on Baby Steps) and Ultraam’s Matthew Cullen (One Hit Wonder), while the only other drums – on the latter – are the work of Lee Falco (Donald Fagen, Doyle Bramhall II), the producer of Heaven Depends, and recorder of Cacti. The piano on Napoleon Complex is played by Will Bryant, while the closer, Baby Steps, features the multi-instrumentalist and stylistically similar, London-based folk artist, Felix M-B, with whom O’Reilly issued a split Bandcamp NAACP benefit single for Juneteenth last year. Completing the line-up with a sublime duet cameo on the heart-crushing Twist is Lemoncello’s Laura Quirke.
Just as when in a live setting, O’Reilly possesses the magnetic performance dynamic that can rivet an attendee to the spot in full attention mode; he also does so with his extremely intimate recordings. His incisive songcraft pulls you into his world – a place of graphic memories, hearts and flowers, wide-eyed wonder, hopes, regrets, and life’s little quirks – and it’s impossible not to surrender to the experience.
Marriage Material is available now as a digital download.
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BANDCAMP: https://lorkinoreilly.bandcamp.com/album/marriage-material
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/Lorkin-OReilly-933911769961677
Photography Credit: Matthew Cullen