Much has been made in the music press of the recent resurgence of a particularly experimental brand of Irish folk music. Centred around a Dublin scene that includes Lankum, Landless, Junior Brother, ØXN, Ye Vagabonds, Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn – many of whom work in loose collaboration with one another – this mini-renaissance has produced some of the most brilliant music of the last decade. Always uncompromising, politically engaged and sonically engaging, many of these bands have gravitated towards the River Lea record label and to the production work of John ‘Spud’ Murphy.
Members of two of those bands – Landless and Lankum – came together to form Poor Creature, another band on the Murphy/River Lea axis. Ruth Clinton (from Niamh & Ruth and Landless) was joined by Cormac MacDiarmada of Lankum, later expanding to a trio with John Dermody from The Jimmy Cake (and live drummer for Lankum). With “All Smiles Tonight,” they have created an album of great power and scope, even by the standards of their respective bands.
Whole books could – and probably will – be written about how the Covid-19 pandemic reshaped our listening habits and the recording practices of musicians, but it’s nonetheless worth noting here that Poor Creature is a child of lockdown. MacDiarmada and Clinton found themselves isolated and with a lot of time on their hands. They played a handful of online gigs as a duo, as was the necessity back then before Dermody joined eighteen months later. They played their first gig as a trio (a benefit gig for a friend’s greyhound’s hip operation) without having practiced together, and they credit the unrehearsed improvisation methods for the sound of their first album.
Certainly, there is something strangely visceral about their work. The first track on All Smiles Tonight, Adieu Lovely Eireann, begins with a throbbing rhythmic pulse. The taut percussion and muscular production situate us in a dark and almost post-apocalyptic musical landscape. But the melody, and in particular Clinton’s high, clear singing, provide an alluring sense of contrast. On one side, there is a harsh repetitiveness; on the other, a gentle, wandering vocal line. Taken together, they create a creepy kind of beauty. The song’s instrumental denouement is abrupt: a thick, descending electronic gurgle, and then nothing.
The very distinctive sound that runs through much of this album (dry but powerful drums, insistent, looping structures) came about partly as a result of the band’s penchant for vintage equipment, particularly Clinton’s Hohner Organetta, which gave the original spine to many of these songs. For its opening seconds, Bury Me Not sounds like a traditional folk song, albeit one of the lyrically dark variety, with Clinton putting in a typically airy vocal performance. Then, the hollow, minimal percussion kicks in, accompanied by background wails and creaks. Once again, the song’s ending is strange and unexpected. These two opening songs – Bury Me Not and Adieu Lovely Eireann – contain within them much of the album’s thematic meat. The band are constantly engaging with ideas of parting (perhaps the final parting) and of loss. Maybe this too came out of the fraught emotional states of Covid lockdown.
Whatever the root of these themes – and they have been important themes in folk music for centuries – Poor Creature are capable of exploring them in different ways and from different musical angles. MacDiarmada provides an aching lead vocal for the melancholic Lorene, which channels the melancholy nature of country music into something immensely powerful and moving. And where many of the songs are traditional, some are covers. Lorene is a Louvin Brothers number, and The Whole Town Knows takes a song best known from the Philomena Begley and Ray Lynam version and toughens it up with looped beats and industrial, almost Lynchian background noises. Without sacrificing the nostalgic, bittersweet melody, the trio somehow manage to turn it from a song of illicit love to a tense and fretful comment on the climate crisis, with a spooked instrumental section that takes up the song’s entire second half, and in which organic and metallic noises seem to meld into one. It’s at moments like these that the steady guiding hand of Murphy’s production seems to come into its own.
The title track is a country standard known mainly in Ireland and the UK from the version by the Chieftains. Poor Creature’s take on it features an astringent drone undercutting the sweet but detached lead vocal from Clinton. Here and elsewhere, the band use instruments associated with traditional music – the fiddle or the accordion – and they use them in unexpected ways, banking them up to create walls of sound or stretching them out to create a folk version of Dylan’s ‘thin wild mercury sound’. Sometimes, the music is stripped right back, as on An Draighnean Donn, whose chiming intro is replaced by disorienting multitracked vocals, which are then joined by warped drones, creating a rich but inscrutable swirl of sound.
Hick’s Farewell – another song of mortal parting – takes an old bluegrass tune by Doc Watson and applies the characteristic drone, slowing it right down until it becomes a pounding psychedelic dirge. But All Smile Tonight withholds its most potent gift until the very end. Willie-O is a well-known song of the night-visiting type, also sometimes called Bay of Biscay. Here, it becomes a ten-minute behemoth, with Clinton’s voice at the forefront. The song builds almost imperceptibly for the bulk of its duration, the slight shifts in the background drone creating a woozy, haunted atmosphere. At about the halfway point, the pitch begins to rise like an aeroplane taking off, and then, with a couple of minutes left, a tense rhythm leads into a finale which is both lysergic and darkly gothic.
Tension, contrast and juxtaposition are words that inevitably come to mind at multiple points throughout All Smiles Tonight. Poor Creature are masters at harnessing that tension and creating soundworlds that are utterly compelling from start to finish. This is music that straddles darkness and light, and traverses the blasted terrain of loss in wholly unexpected ways, picking apart and reassembling the whole idea of folk music as it goes.
All Smiles Tonight (July 11th, 2025) River Lea
Pre-Order/Save: https://poorcreature.ffm.to/allsmiles
Forthcoming Poor Creature Tour Dates:
July 12th – Spin dizzy instore, Dublin
July 14th – Rough Trade East Instore, London
Aug 31st – Supersonic Festival, Birmingham
Sep 12th – The Duncairn, Belfast
Sep 16th – The Attic, Leeds
Sep 17th – The Portland Arms, Cambridge
Sep 18th – The Larder House, Southbourne – Wandering Bear Presents
Sep 19th – Strange Brew, Bristol
Sep 20th – Subterranean Festival, London Royal Festival Hall, London
Sep 21st – YES, Manchester
Nov 27th – The Button Factory, Dublin