It’s hard to put RÓIS into words, to try to explain anything she does without tainting the experience somehow. You simply have to partake in the tragedy that’s taking place all around you.
Like Landless, Lankum, John Francis Flynn, et al., she’s repurposed history and given it wings. And this is ancient, pre-Christian stuff– with the kind of sounds you don’t hear every day.
MO LÉAN is a tribute to, and reimagining of, the pre-Christian tradition of ‘keening’. Like charismatic meditation or talking in tongues, grieving becomes the griever. Language deconstructs into ritual.
As Brecht once asked, in the dark times will there also be singing? In the same vein, ‘WHAT DO YOU SAY’ constitutes an extraordinary opening – once more, closer to theatre than anything else, where a voice wavers, hovers at the enormity of it all. The stuttery, manic repetition evokes Beckett’s Not I, or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis: ‘What…what…do you…do you say?’
RÓIS’ voice is astounding – one that will often quiver, as though circling a trauma amid a backdrop of murderous, patriarchal Catholicism and British colonialism. And on one level, it’s horrific, like listening to someone screaming. But, beyond this, there’s healing. And you don’t just ‘listen’ to RÓIS; you absorb, and finally transform into, RÓIS.
It’s as though Bjork was actually from Fermanagh and got really into ‘keening’. Sometimes, the production sounds a bit like Sampha or James Blake, with bassy, post-Dub synth. Radiohead’s Amnesiac lingers in the background. Bells abound – like the ushering in of change amid layers of history, not to mention the ubiquitous Angelus on Irish TV.
This isn’t the stuff of ‘singles’, though ‘CAOINE’ is the official ‘single’– an old keening song with a salient, bassy synth and an earthiness that would have made sense to someone in pre-Christian times. The motif of bells evokes Nicolas Jaar’s micro-deep electro, not to mention Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. It all feels like the end of something.
Maybe ecstatic song is the most appropriate response to the things we can hardly say. ‘OH LOVELY APPEARANCE OF DEATH’ plays again on our heightened responses to trauma of death. We hear a beautiful folksong, which also alludes to Bach’s Aria, ‘Come, Sweet Death’. ‘THE DEATH NOTICES’ similarly plays on our cultural misunderstanding of death, replete with irony: ‘Hello and welcome to the death notices. We are sorry to inform you but there will be no death notices this morning’.
‘FEEL LOVE’ is a helter-skelter, electro-pop song with a Brat-ish, manic vocal. The song hangs between deathly nihilism and jubilant escapism: ‘I’m happy now! I’m happy now! I’m happy now!’ Both song and album culminate in a mock-symphonic ‘ending’, not dissimilar to the piano at the end of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’– a nod to George Martin, perhaps.
We don’t quite know where we are anymore, what century it’s supposed to be. She could go anywhere with this; maybe she’ll drop the concept altogether. Regardless, MO LÉAN is a masterful album– with incantatory soundscapes that leave you for dead.
Bandcamp: https://roismusicroismusic.bandcamp.com/album/mo-l-an