Review Summary: Nothing false to be found in this droning behemoth of enigmatic Irish folk
Lankum, formerly Lynched, are masters of inducing a certain mood, of taking all the various threads of Irish folk music and unthreading them, stretching and reweaving those various strands into their own personal retelling of all the past’s folk traditions, a retelling fraught with stark gravitas and looming dread, a portentous weight added to the swing of the past’s pendulum. Lankum have always done Irish Folk, first and foremost, but their conception of it has always been with an ear for ambience and effect, a hypnotic, fever-dream sensibility that took the songs and stories of past centuries and rewrote them in shades of brown and grey and rust; blood and gibbets and wind-blown heaths as the stock in trade of these Dublin natives.
No denying, though, that Lankum is a modern band, its folk lens magnifying contemporary sensibilities, its reshaping and reworking of past material done with a flair for the dramatic, the traditional folk tunes interwoven with passages of drone and percussion and light brushstrokes of post-industrial atmosphere that seem as much drawn from more far-flung folk traditions as from their homeland. Such is the expansive quality of the music that, despite its obvious rootedness in Irish folk, there’s a broader element at play here, a more global concern with texture and tone, the music at times almost collapsing into a droney morass of peat-bog ambiance recalling the muddled murk of myth and memory. The folk tropes are followed through with all due respect for the tradition, but when it all begins to churn itself into the rust-tinged atmospherics, draws out its mood into passages of drone and ambient all touched with that light veneer of industrial grime, Lankum show themselves to be very much their own beast. The New York Trader is about as close as Lankum ever get to being spiritual descendants of McGowan and Co., as their dirgey drone tumbles into a stormy, punked up reel at the close of the tale of righteous mutiny. But in spite of their punk past, brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch are far more celtic in sensibility, more rooted in myth and mystery than the spiky straightforwardness of that other legendary Irish folk collective.
Part of the beauty of
False Lankum is that, in spite of its ponderous 70-minute runtime, very little feels superfluous or overwrought. Even at their most drawn-out, the songs all carry with them such a sense of atmosphere and depth, with much of the ambience being woven by traditional instruments, that whole minutes can go by unmarked as the listener is baptized in all that murk of ancient history before the stories and songs themselves come rising up again. That these simple tunes and melodies should be capable of bearing the weight of an extra five minutes or more speaks to Lankum’s instinct for their craft, for their ability to turn their music towards that strange, drifting quality that bears the listener along with it. The album glides by easily, a storm cloud looming disconcertingly on the horizon as the band’s collection of traditional instruments chant and hum, clang and groan.
Vocalist Radie Peat carries in her voice that thin, stretched, steely quality so often found in the likes of Appalachian folk, a world-weary indomitableness that is as haunting as it is lovely. If you take nothing else away from this album, take Go Dig My Grave, as a comfortably well-worn standard is subjected to a slow-motion lough drowning, drawn out into a clanging, dissociated trance-state as hypnotic as it is horrifying. Ian Lynch, though his vocal style does justice to the music and subject matter, doesn’t quite live up to what Radie is bringing, though this speaks more to Radie’s strengths than any weakness as a vocalist Lynch might have. And although the album is divided generally into male-led, female-led and instrumental tracks, there’s never a sense that any one of those formulas has a clear advantage over the others. Even Master Crowley’s, an accordion-led instrumental jig, feels as essential to the rest of the album, playing itself straightforwardly until the whole thing falls away into clanging post-industrial before returning to its main theme with all the abandon of the dancing plague.
But in spite of all the haunting subject matter and mood, Lankum are just as comfortable taking their tunes to warm hearths and the fragile comforts to be eked out of life. The same band that makes the nightmarish Go Dig My Grave is just as comfortable in the warmth of home and fire as it is in all the blood and murder that they’ll no doubt be noted for. Newcastle is perhaps the most straightforward of these shifts, still laced with the dreamlike quality woven throughout the album, but touched with a sense of sweetness and longing. The well-roundedness of mood on False Lankum, in spite of its patina of grim portent, the shifts between those stark death-agonies and homey warmth and intimacy, give a sense of completeness to the album; if they were to focus solely on the drawn-out traumatics of the death-tunes, it would have left the whole thing somewhat one-dimensional, a too-common mistake for anyone in this day and age who is enthralled with the stark confrontation with death that makes up a decent portion of most any folk tradition. That Lankum are able to make their unsettled atmosphere the running theme of the album, regardless of the mood or subject matter of individual songs, gives the whole project an admirable coherence, a knack for making even the most familiar of folk-tropes seem somehow alien and otherworldly. It’s pretty easy then, with Lankum’s expansive bent and talent for atmosphere, to let yourself drift off into all the blood and fog for an hour or so. But be ready for it all to stick with you for a while.
