The more experimental members of Dublin’s vibrant folk scene have been on blistering form this year. New records by John Francis Flynn, Lisa O’Neill and Lankum could all potentially lay claim to album of the year status, with Lankum’s brilliant False Lankum gaining particular critical claim (and rightfully earning a spot on the Mercury Prize shortlist). One of the great things about this kind of scene is how fertile it can be – Dublin’s artistic landscape in 2023 is more than just a logistical infrastructure of music pubs and record labels; it also houses an environment of creativity where ideas can cross-pollinate and musicians can switch between codes and bands. Such is the case with ØXN, a new quartet featuring Lankum’s Radie Peat along with singer/songwriter/composer Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler of kraut-shoegazers Percolator, and producer/engineer/multi-instrumentalist John ‘Spud’ Murphy.
The seeds for ØXN were sown back in 2020 when Myler, Peat and Kim came together to perform a live version of the grisly murder ballad Love Henry. A reworking of that song appears on CYRM and is the album’s first single. It builds from a disorienting drone, piles on some incantatory backing vocals and primal percussion, and peaks in a clanging ritualistic flurry of dramatic singing and delightfully dirty synths. It is one of three traditional songs that make up CYRM’s first side, and while all three differ slightly in style and execution, they all share an atmosphere of weirdness, of lingering terror. These are songs that, despite the cosmopolitan, modern nature of their recording, have their roots deep in the strange and fractured underbelly of history.
Opener Cruel Mother is another well-known murder ballad, but ØXN render it new and mysterious: it becomes a nine-minute epic centred on Peat’s powerful singing, developing along an insistent guitar line and Myler’s Faust-like drumming. The finale is trancelike and hallucinatory, indebted to the propulsiveness of krautrock, the pagan acid folk of Comus, and the off-kilter rhythms found in Japanese experimental rock. The group explore a more tender side on The Trees They Do Grow High, its funereal piano providing a circuitous but satisfying route to the song’s morbid conclusion.
CYRM’s second side contains two covers and a Katie Kim original. The original – The Feast – is beautiful and enigmatic, beginning in a flutter and lurching through darkly muted drums and drones. Its intriguing narrative is based on scenes from Nick Cave’s novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, and it is ripe with visions of comets and strange light on the water. The Wife Of Michael Cleary is a cover of a song by fellow Irish artist Maija Sofia. It is possessed of a brooding, doomy minimalism which breaks into a defiant melody.
Last, and most astonishing, is a cover of Scott Walker’s masterpiece Farmer In The City, a song that examines the relationship between Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and his partner Ninetto Divoli. Walker, of course, was the most protean of artists: an American-Canadian by birth who morphed into a kind of British pop pinup before donning the garb of French existentialism, immersing himself in the songs of Belgium’s most famous poet-chansonnier, dabbling in teutonic aesthetics, and, on Tilt (where Farmer In The City originally appeared) exploring Mediterranean and South American themes through the medium of Berlin-influenced industrial avant-garde. Walker’s worldview permitted anything and everything, so Farmer is a perfect choice for a band so impossible to pigeonhole as ØXN. They do a perfect job on it too, doubling the song’s length to nearly thirteen minutes, channelling the dark experimental pop of Jenny Hval, embracing the darkness of the original, then cranking up the industrial clangour and drawing out the threads of fear and hope, dread and grief at the song’s heart. You won’t hear many more ambitious, emotionally draining, oddly uplifting album closers than this.
It’s this sheer ambitiousness and ØXN’s unwillingness to conform in any way to stereotypes that make them something of an outlier, even in a scene that is open to experimental music. It also makes them one of the most vital acts in that (or any) scene. This uncompromising debut album is like a monolith looming through fog.
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ØXN feature in our latest KLOF Mixtape: