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.

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.