Folk/Trad Adjacent Record Corner

Ian Lynch All You Need Is Death OST (2024)

All You Need Is Death is a film about song collectors who learn of a haunted song from the deep past. This is the soundtrack to it, mostly instrumental but with a couple of bursts of vocal from people who appear in the film, including Simone Collins (the film's co-lead), Brendan Gleeson (a tradder in real life as well as an actor), and then a terrifying turn from Olwen Fouéré. Ian Lynch is one of Lankum and this record might appeal to people have been put off that band by an aversion to rough working class Dublin voices.

Bandcamp

Leonard Barry Littoral (2024)

My beloved picked up a copy of this at a gig launching the album. Barry is an uilleann piper and this sees him playing traditional tunes with an array of other musicians. I have been known to claim that Irish traditional music played in a straight down the line way does not record well (the success of Planxty and the Chieftains provides no counterargument), but Littoral proves me wrong. It is pleasing on the ear and well produced and I recommend it to anyone who needs more piping in their lives.

Bandcamp

S. R. Sellens "A Drop of Nelson's Blood" (2023)

This is a well-known sea shanty in which the first verse goes like this:

"Oh a drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm
A drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm
A drop of Nelson' blood wouldn't do us any harm
And we'll all hang on behind"

Later verses substitute various other things for 'A drop of Nelson's blood' (e.g. a night out with the girls, a damn good flogging, a nice fat cook (this may be the bowdlerised version), and so on). The song's origins are from the possibly true story that after Nelson was killed at Trafalgar his body was brought home in a barrel of brandy, with the thirsty sailors being happy to drink some of the brandy even if it might be contaminated by Nelson's blood (yarrr!). Or perhaps Nelson's blood became a nickname for rum, in which Nelson was also reported to have been pickled.

This particular recording is a musical accompaniment to a Regency Cthulhu (think Jane Austen heroines v. eldritch horror) roleplaying game scenario in which the players attend a banquet and are served some special brandy in a nothing-to-worry-about manner. It's actually an impressively solid recording of a tune I have sung myself many times at Unthanks singing weekends.

The Young'Uns (Pavilion Theatre)

As you may know, The Young'Uns are a trio of singers and musicians from the north east of England. Their background is in folk music, the name being given to them by the old lags when they were starting out in the folk clubs. While I associate them primarily with sea shanties and unaccompanied tunes featuring close vocal harmonies, a considerable chunk of their oeuvre is made up of original songs, with these taking up most of the night's setlist. These ones are typically accompanied by members of band playing piano or guitar and are much less driven by vocal harmonies. I used to grumble at the preponderance of the original tunes in the Young'Uns' sets and recordings, but I have come to really appreciate them and like the contrast they present to the shanties.

The original Young'Uns tunes are often about real people, recounting poignant or uplifting stories about their battles against adversity or their efforts to make the world a better place. So you have songs about a woman who leaves little notes on a bridge encouraging would-be suicides not to jump, a man who makes meals for refugees stuck outside Calais, a young guy who was flying to meet his girlfriend in New York when his plane was brought down by the Lockerbie bombing, a Derry man blinded by a rubber bullet who went on to meet and befriend the soldier who took his sight, a British trauma surgeon who found himself saving the life of an ISIS fighter in Aleppo while other ISIS fighters stood around with guns, oblivious to the kidnappable Westerner in front of them. And so on. Described coldly these subjects sound like they could produce songs of sickening sentimentality, but they somehow work and prove to be genuinely moving, with even the most jaded cynics in the audience feeling the occasional tear in their eye (their song "Lyra" wa the one that did for me).

The other odd thing about the Young'Uns is that they are rofflers, or in particular David Eagle (who also plays piano) is. I think we needed that as the songs on their own could be pretty heavy, but it was a strange type of laughter you would get when a song about suicide was followed by Eagle cracking a joke about having played a bum note. They also used switches to shanties or uplifting vocal tunes as palate cleansers.

So all in all an enjoyable concert. And not just for me: also in the audience was Irish trad deity Christy Moore, although I completely failed to clock him and it was my beloved who mentioned that he had been in front of me in the merch queue. I think he was left to enjoy the concert in peace, which was nice.

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Irish News: "Sean Cooney of The Young'uns on immortalising Lyra McKee and Richard Moore on powerful new album Tiny Notes"

A song and a story: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather"

This year the World Science Fiction Convention (i.e. Worldcon) is taking place in Chicago. I am not going, but because I voted in site selection I have a supporting membership of the convention, which means I get to vote in this year's Hugo Awards. That means I receive the voters packet: digital copies of most of the works that made it onto the ballot. But before the packet was distributed I went and read all the finalists in the short story category, as these are all available to read online. To be honest, not all of these are great, but one really stood out for me, that being Sarah Pinsker's "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather". This is presented as though it were the talk page of Lyricsplainer, one of those websites like Mudcat where people discuss the lyrics of folk songs. In the story the people are discussing the obscure folk tune "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather", whose lyrics can also be found in both the Child and Roud collection of ballads. The song tells of a man and woman meeting together for a tryst in the woods, where oaken hearts do gather (that line is repeated throughout the song). There is an element of foreboding, with the reader perhaps fearing that the man will have less than noble intentions, but things take an unexpected turn and it is the man who suffers a terrible fate. The lyrics go on to suggest that his fate is a ritualistic one and that these events will be repeated when other men find themselves lured into the woods, where oaken hearts do gather. What exactly is happening here remains oblique, but that only adds to the sense of unease the lyrics generate.

Meanwhile, in the Lyricsplainer comments people there are discussing the song and making the case for particular variants of the words. We also see the kind of feuding and trolling that bedevils the online world. But buried in among all the chatter one of the commenters starts talking about how he thinks the song is set in a specific place in England, which he decides to find for himself. As the discussion progresses he posts again about how his inquiries are progressing. What happens next may not surprise you; in the best tradition of folk horror, the reader twigs where the story is going a good bit before the protagonist does. That does not stop the ending from packing a considerable punch.

You can read the story for yourself on the website of Uncanny magazine here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/where-oaken-hearts-do-gather/ Sarah Pinsker meanwhile is a musician as well as a writer. Her band The Stalking Horses have recorded their own version of the song. It would not spoil your enjoyment of the story if you listened to this first, or vice versa. image source (Guardian: "Getting back to nature: how forest bathing can make us feel better")

v/a "Old Tunes, Fresh Takes: season #01 // mixtape" (2020)

By an odd coincidence, within a few days of being asked to review the Late Bloøm and Rosa Anschütz albums I was also asked to review this. But what is it? Well, it is a compilation of tunes recorded for the Old Tunes, Fresh Takes podcast, which is run by Jack Sibley and Tim Woodson. For the podcast, people recorded new versions of folk tunes, with these people often being people from outside the purist folk tradition, recording the songs with whatever instruments they have to hand (the podcast started during lockdown) and not necessarily in a reverential folkie manner. Looking at the track listing I can see that the album features several versions of the same songs, notably 'Brisk Lad', 'My Son David', & 'Cruel Mother', and listening to it reveals that some of the songs with different titles are in fact also versions of some of the others. The people playing on the record are not names familiar to me but I am remarkably ignorant so they are probably all household names; I did at least notice the musical alter-egos of the two guys who run the podcast, Hevelwood and Jack The Robot.

But is it any good? Now, if I had never heard this record and you were to describe the basic concept to me, I would say "That sounds terrible", my thinking being that folk music is one form that does not profit from updating or incursions from new instrumentation or later forms of music. And you may recall the extreme hostility with which I reviewed music by The Imagined Village, another lot who combined electronic stuff with folky stuff. However, for me this record works. Although it is I think coming from a different direction, it ends up reaching a similar aesthetic position to some of the Ghost Box records, with the vocals (often the most folkie part of these tracks) seeming to haunt the electronic or electric musical accompaniment. Also the tracks somehow feel like they are still true to the essence of their folk origins even while emerging from a radically different mode of instrumentation. It helps I think that a fair few of the songs are of the edgy and sinister folk tradition, as opposed to the more bland hey nonny nonny school.

I should point out also that this compilation is being made available on a pay-what-you-like basis on Bandcamp, with the money raised going to Help Musicians UK and Music in Detention. The first of these helps musicians throughout their careers and into retirement, while the second uses music to help people being held in British immigration detention centres.

Check out the compilation on Bandcamp or the podcast on Soundcloud.

Lal and Mike Waterson "Bright Phoebus" (1971)

After deriving great enjoyment from blasting out the title track at the recent Unthanks weekend, I resolved to look for this record, finding it in Coda, the folkie record shop in Edinburgh. Together with their sister Norma, the Watersons were big players in the 1960s folk revival, mostly known for unaccompanied singing of traditional tunes. Bright Phoebus however is different, being newly composed songs performed with instrumentation, sometimes very sparse and sometimes more lush. It is an odd beast and I can see why it might have disconcerted folk purists when it came out. Some of the songs sound very much like extrapolations of the folk canon, notably 'The Scarecrow' and 'Fine Horseman', but others go in very different directions. The album opens with the jaunty 'Rubber Band', in which Mike and others sings about their being the fictional Rubber Band, making this the folk equivalent of the opener to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (a record released by the Beatles); this jaunty tune sounds very far removed from the world of silver tankards and people singing shanties with fingers in their ear. Likewise 'Magical Man', 'Shady Lady' (reverse engineered country) and the title track. 'Bright Phoebus' starts off with just guitar and Mike's voice, but then more voices and instruments come in, with both arrangements and composition leading this away from the uncontaminated stream of pure folk music. Going back to Beatles analogies, the track could the Watersons' 'Hey Jude' (analogy does not work if you dislike 'Hey Jude').

Anyway, this is a great record, with the juxtaposition of the folkie numbers and the brash uptempo tracks giving the album an exciting feeling of expectations being shattered. Long out of print it is great to see it recently re-issued by Domino, now basking in the reputation of a lost classic. Sadly Lal and Mike Waterson are no longer alive to see their record attract a new generation of admirers.


image sources:

Bright Phoebus (Discogs)

Lal and Mike Waterson (Guardian: Bright Phoebus review)

Santa Rita concert: Rue

One class of concert I keep going to and not writing about are these Santa Rita concerts organised by the Ergodos people and held in the Little Museum of Dublin. They follow a similar pattern: one arrives and has a little drink of the wine from the sponsors (Santa Rita) and then mills around the rooms of the Little Museum of Dublin, which is a Georgian house on St Stephen's Green that has been converted into a quirky museum of Dublin stuff. Then Garret Sholdice of Ergodos has a chat with the artist performing by a fireplace after which everyone is encouraged to skull another glass of the tasty wine (from Santa Rita) before heading down to the exhibition room for the concert, in which it is not permitted to bring the wine. The concert is then usually about an hour long. which means I get home sufficiently early that my cat is not too annoyed at having her dinner delayed.

The concerts are not always of the same type. Sometimes they are of the classical recital class, with particularly memorable ones in this regard including Malcolm Proud playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on harpsichord and William Butt playing music by Bach and Britten on cello. They have also had folkie ones, like Sam Lee's interesting folklorist performances of tunes collected from Irish Travellers or Chris Woods' neo-folk adventures. And they also have whacky performance art nonsense like a Jennifer Walshe concert where she did the whole event like it was a seance or funny electronic stuff like the one by Chris Watson, where he stitched together a load of wildlife recordings to create an imaginary vision of a magical country rising temporarily from beneath the sea. Whatever they serve up, these concerts are always great and I pass judgment on my so-called music aficionado friends who never show up to them.

The most recent one of these concerts was by Rue. Rue are a local three piece comprising Radie Peat and Cormac Dermody, both also of band Lankum, and Brian Flanagan from the United States of America. They are billed as being a cross-fertilisation of Irish trad-music and Appalachian music from over there. The concert was good but I found it more like redux version of Lankum than an actual trans-Atlantic mind meld. Much of this came from the fore-grounding of Radie Peat's work in the set, both her drones and her vocals, with several of them being her on her own which meant that poor Brian Flanagan did not get much of a look in. But for all that here were some great tuneage on display in the performance. The two that struck in my mind, perhaps because I had heard them before, were 'Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe' and 'T Stands for Thomas'. The latter is a variant of 'P Stands for Paddy', a song of coded courting, while the former is a first person testament from said Biddy Mulligan, a resident of the Coombe and a street trader. The song has apparently gone through an odd journey as in days of yore it was pretty much sung in music halls to make fun of the working class residents of the Coombe but in more recent years it has acquired a more celebratory tone.

Caveats about intercontinental failure aside, this was still a great concert. Possibly the unique selling point of the Santa Rita concerts (aside from the wine) is how cosy they are - it is easy to end up sitting almost on top of the artists. And it is nice being on top of artists.


image source:

Rue (Culturefox)

Lankum: live and on record

Back before Christmas in the Beforetime I went to see Lankum playing in Vicar Street. But who are Lankum? Well they are a bunch of Dublin folkie-tradders from Foxrock who developed their love of music while studying at Blackrock College and Muckross (true fact). Two of them are brothers whose surname is Lynch, so for a while they traded under the name Lynched before realising that this might make it difficult to get gigs in the United States. So they changed their name to Lankum, a reference to 'False Lankum', a version of the 'Cruel Lincoln' / 'Long Lankin' murder ballad. I have been hearing about how good they are for years but it was only recently when Radie Peat of the band appeared on John Kelly's Mystery Train to talk a good musical game and one of their tunes cropped up elsewhere and sounded like my kind of thing that I decided to take the leap and investigate them. I lassoed some pals to share a table at this concert and bought their most recent album (Beneath the Earth and the Sky)beforehand to gain some sense of their recorded work. Thus fortified I arrived at Vicar Street.

There are four members of Lankum, two Lynches and two non-Lynches, of whom one is part of the Dermody musical clan and the other is Ms Peat. The music is quite droney, much of it coming from Peat's harmonium and concertina but also from one of the Lynches playing uilleann pipes. The tunes are mostly trad arrs but there are a couple of more recent tunes by other people and even some by Lankum themselves. Radie Peat maybe sings most of the songs; she is impressive and hearing her reminds me of how unusual it is to hear Dublin working class women sing in their own accent, which is particularly strong on 'What Will We Do When We Have No Money?', the album's opener. However what might be the most striking tune is sung by one of the blokes, this being 'The Turkish Reveille', the one about the captain who promises a sailor all kind of things to sink an enemy ship before betraying the sailor and leaving him to drown. The piece is very evocative of the horror of finding yourself stuck out in the middle of the ocean, with the drones and the repeated lyric about lonely lonesome water building a general sense of watery doom.

Anyway, that's Lankum for you. They are worth investigating both live and on record. Aside from having good music on it, their Beneath the Earth and Sky record is also conceptually interesting, as it was recorded (Albini-style) by Julie McLarnon at the Analogue Catalogue studio, where they only use analogue kit. To some that might seem like the very embodiment of rockism but it is an interesting constraint and I think the approach benefits music of this type (for all that I have only listened to it on digital media).

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Lankum (Guardian - Lankum: Between the Earth and Sky review)