We always knew Lankum were good live – but how good, exactly? At Vicar Street, only a stone’s throw from The Liberties, we find Ian Lynch in jokey, wry form: “This is very, very serious business […]what we’re trying to do is rend a ginormous tear in the very fabric of space and time itself.”
There will be some who say their studio work is more accomplished. This would serve as a tribute to producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy, whose analogue yet contemporary production touches on vast swathes of Irish culture just as it says something entirely new. And you’d be forgiven for thinking they were out on a limb here, particularly on the back of The Livelong Day and False Lankum –two of the finest folk albums in recent memory. But sometimes, when you let something loose, it takes on a new life.
That drone. The Wild Rover is peak-drone, with funeral clangs – tremulous and bright, somewhere between enslavement and an uprising, the plough and the machine. Lankum make music so we won’t forget; they invoke the darkness, draw it in like an old friend.
Go Dig My Grave is a grave, hysterical masterpiece in its own right. In the wake of Peadar O’ Goill’s demented music video, we knew exactly what to expect – from the Old Time banjo to the brittle scythe. Radie Peat’s howl is prophetic, so raw it makes you stop whatever you’re doing and listen; it is the sound of a human being amid a backdrop of strings and sirens. It is the sound of flaw.
There is a brief sense that the album is already out of date, that the band have already surpassed the likes of Vicar Street. At Kilmainham last weekend, the blood-coloured light, the setting of the sun against Lynch’s shadowed arc as he bowed, were momentous and felt like the start of something new, something huge.
To each their own. If you close your eyes during Hunting the Wren or strip away some of the electronics in Fugue, they are, in many ways, the same old band. They could be playing the Cobblestone on a quiet evening; maybe this is what they’d rather be doing.
The final track, Bear Creek, is a timely reminder that huge chunks of their set do not include singing; by the end, violas and fiddles are playing us off to American Old Time. It’s all quite Brechtian – from the disappearance of performers onstage to the foregrounding of instruments, the traditional reels and audience participation. With its very clear sense of time and logical progression, the sound descends into a session, along with its deeper and more pressing elements – people, communities, our cultural and historical underpinnings.
And, like the Palestinian flag that flew so persistently above the crowd at Kilmainham, Lankum’s music is vital. The album is nothing if not heartfelt: a true record of a band at the peak of their powers.
Pre-Order here: https://lankum.ffm.to/liveindublin