Album reviews: Big Red Machine's impressive prog-pop; Orla Gartland is Ireland's new star
Big Red Machine include Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner; right. Orla Gartland has hit the Irish and UK charts.
★★★★☆
The second album from Big Red Machine could have plausibly been titled “what Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner did next”. On the heels of last year’s lockdown double-surprise of Folklore and Evermore, Swift and The National guitarist have reunited for a number of tracks on Dessner’s prog-pop side project (Swift also suggested the record title).
The most immediately striking of their collaborations is the single Renegade, which sketches out an alternative reality in which Swift goes back in time and fronts My Bloody Valentine. It’s fantastic, as is Birch, a duet between Swift and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver – who is also Dessner’s full creative partner on Big Red Machine.
Big Red Machine will be familiar to Cork audiences following a seismic 2017 gig at St Luke’s Church as part of the Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival. That concert was an exercise in gorgeous chaos. But Dessner and Vernon’s writing is tighter on their second LP together, which is variously informed by Dessner’s experiences with depression and his nostalgia for his childhood in Cincinnati.
Most moving of all perhaps is Hutch – a lament for late Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchison, featuring a keening vocal from Lisa Hannigan.
★★★★☆
Orla Gartland first came to widespread attention when featuring on the soundtrack to Normal People. Her full-length debut is, however, the very opposite of “normal”. Blending wonderfully unorthodox songwriting and a Gen Z sense of despair rising like the oceans, the 26-year-old Dubliner weaves twitchy songs that stay the right side of quirky and at moments gleam with a wonky beauty.
She’s a real shapeshifter, too. Things That I’ve Learned starts off as a Sleater-Kinney-style indie belter and then spirals, delightfully and surprisingly, into lo-fi r’n'b. And on You’re Not Special, Babe she displays remarkable confidence as she sets out her manifesto – we are all united in our conviction that our lives are uniquely cursed – while finding middle ground between Regina Spector and Julien Baker.
Woman On The Internet is generating huge momentum and currently hovers just outside the UK top ten, with an even bigger placing expected in Ireland. Success for Gartland would, among other achievements, go some way towards addressing the appalling gender imbalance in the Irish scene.
But regardless of where it charts, the album marks the arrival of a daring new voice in Irish alternative music.
