Landless are an Irish Quartet featuring Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch. Their debut album, Bleaching Bones, was released in 2018, and we’ve since featured many, if not all, of the tracks from that album across several Mixtapes here on KLOF Mag. They have just announced their new album ‘Lúireach’, due for release on 7th June 2024 on Glitterbeat, which finds them once more mining traditional ballads and more recently penned folk songs. The album was produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy, known for his inspired work with artists such as Lankum and ØXN.
…subtlety and grace abound in this album. There is something about voices in harmony that make you feel good – and Landless have this to perfection. There are no airs and graces, just beautiful harmonies, their sound uplifting and spiritual, even ethereal.
Richard Hollingham, KLOF Mag
Lúireach sees some subtle changes from their debut. Across the album, they’ve added instrumentation, including pump organ, shruti box, trombone on one track and Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada on fiddle, viola and banjo throughout. That said, the instrumentation is subtle and sparingly used so that unaccompanied feel and vocal-rich focus is not lost. You can hear this on the lead single ‘The Fisherman’s Wife‘, a song that was written by Ewan MacColl for the 1960 BBC Radio Ballad ‘Singing the Fishing‘, created by MacColl, together with Birmingham radio producer Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger.
In the notes for the album, Ruth explains that while the melody and lyrics are paramount, there is a common theme for many of the songs they’ve chosen. “Frequently in traditional songs women are described as a passive love interest, in terms of their relationship to a male character. It is refreshing to find songs that challenge this power dynamic, but we are not totally hard-line about it, and sing plenty of old-fashioned love songs.”
‘The Fisherman’s Wife’ is told from the wife’s perspective on shore; the song subverts the usual trope of a woman pining for her love at sea. Instead, she speaks of her own work: raising children and repairing fishing nets, resentful but resigned to the fishing way of life. Stark piano and banjo provide a quietly insistent accompaniment to an almost sigh-like vocal arrangement.
In an interview on KLOF Mag, Peggy Seeger told us that she had embarked on a Radio Ballad about women, but it never came to be due to some of the terrible things that were revealed in interviews:
“nothing could have happened with the Radio Ballads without the informants, and without Ewan. He came from working class stock, whereas Charles and I didn’t. Ewan just had an entire dramatic approach to it…he was widely read, and he had folk songs at his command…I did embark on a Radio Ballad about women when Ewan was still alive, but some of the things that they told me Ewan just couldn’t face it…incest, men preying on their daughters, the violence of the men against the women…a picture of women’s position in society began to come out very clearly to him, and he was appalled.”
Watch the accompanying video for The Fisherman’s Wife, directed by Ruth Clinton & Cormac MacDiarmada:
Landless – ‘Lúireach’
New album out 7 June 2024 on Glitterbeat
Formats: LP/ CD/ Digital streaming & downloads
Catalogue numbers: GBCD/LP 157
Pre-order on Bandcamp: https://landless.bandcamp.com/album/l-ireach
DSPs: https://idol-io.ffm.to/luireach
Track-listing:
1. Newry Highwayman
2. Blackwaterside
3. Lúireach Bhríde
4. The Fisherman’s Wife
5. The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry
6. Death and the Lady
7. The Hag
8. My Lagan Love
9. The Wounded Hussar
10. Ej Husári