One Leg One Eye – …And Take The Black Worm With Me

4.2K

Fans of Lankum will know that Ian Lynch likes to experiment. He has helped introduce elements as disparate as drone, music hall and krautrock to his band’s otherwise folky repertoire. But even knowing this, it is unlikely that the average listener will be quite prepared for Lynch’s new solo album, recorded under the name One Leg One Eye.

The first track, Glistening, She Emerges, gives off a dark energy from the outset – elements of droney dark ambient, post-rock and glacial metal. A sense of constant, slow movement. Devoid of noticeable rhythm and punctuated by ghastly instrumental shrieks. It immediately marks out …And Take The Black Worm With Me as music for the witching hour, music for the dark night of the soul. Music, it could be argued, for our own grim times.

The name of the second piece, Bold and Undaunted Youth, might point to something closer to Lynch’s folk roots, and indeed the opening vocal passage, while undoubtedly dark and fragile, is recognisable as the traditional highwayman’s song. Thirteen and a half minutes later, when we’ve been put through the emotional wringer by both the song’s lyrics and Lynch’s uncompromising performance, we are aware that the song has shifted through dense, benighted soundscapes, via the occasional retrofuturistic bleep, to a clanging and mysterious soundworld. That, in turn, subsides to something approaching calm, albeit a wild and perhaps post-apocalyptic kind of calm. It is one of the strangest and most experimental things done to a folk song in recent years and is both disturbing and exhilarating.

At times the drones resemble the sonic equivalent of a parched desert; elsewhere, the texture is thick, noisome, gloopy. I’d Rather Be Tending My Sheep – another lengthy version of a traditional song – begins reedily before Lynch’s voice, strident with desperation, kicks in and echoes through the song’s sonic caverns. It’s a more obscure choice of song, most recently recorded by The Furrow Collective. The lyrics speak of a wish for disconnection, a need to escape from the trappings of money and contemporary life. We can begin to see more clearly Lynch’s motivations: it sounds almost like the extended cathartic outburst of somebody on the very edge of being able to cope with the ever-increasing list of twenty-first-century horrors. This kind of music – these long-form drones, the quiet-loud-quiet narrative arc, the raw vocals – is the natural conduit for angst and redemption. In Lynch’s case, the angst seems to outweigh the redemption, which doesn’t make for easy listening, but sure is compelling.

The two final songs are comparatively short. The Fancy Cannot Cheat So Well, an instrumental,  begins with a deep, churning pulse, soon interrupted by loose percussive bashing. Here Lynch seems to have used Keats’s famous line from Ode To a Nightingale as a jumping-off point from which to explore the turmoil of a feverish imagination. Closer Only the Diceys is perhaps the most surprising thing on the whole album, purely for its tunefulness and its recognisable structure. It rests on a simple, country-ish guitar that twangs and shimmers to the conclusion. The melody is genuinely hummable, while Lynch taps into the Pogues-like vocal energy that characterises much of Lankum’s early work. While it is in the minority, the positivity of Only the Diceys is all the more palpable for its position as the album’s last track. It does suggest the possibility of hope in an otherwise unflinchingly dark world and helps to turn what was already a powerfully impressive album into a very moving one by giving it a sense of journey, a sense of possible release. While …And Take The Black Worm With Me is not for the faint of heart, it is certainly worth taking the plunge: its immense depths are as emotional as they are musical and conceal a haunting beauty.

…And Take The Black Worm With Me (Vinyl/Download/Streaming) will be released on 27 October 2022 (Nyahh009). Bandcamp vinyl pre-order opens on 27/10/2022 – https://nyahhrecords.bandcamp.com/

Album Artwork by Bianka Berggren