Album Review: A hAon, by Teilifís - Cathal Coughlan and Jacknife Lee

The exiled Corkman and his Dublin-born collaborator invoke Kraftwerk for a strange but enjoyable take on mid-20th-century Ireland

Fri, 25 Feb, 2022 - 14:04

Ed Power

★★★★☆

The question of whether the past truly is a foreign country – or in fact lives on as a parallel dimension inside our collective subconscious – is explored in the grippingly unsettling debut by Fatima Mansions/Microdisney iconoclast Cathal Coughlan and producer-to-the-stars Jacknife Lee.

Teilifís is a sort of electronic fever dream equally inspired by early Kraftwerk and surrealist documentarian Adam Curtis. And, as the best conceptual albums do, A hAon envelopes the listener in its own, self-imagined reality.

Coughlan and Lee’s first collaboration – a Teilifís second record is already completed – functions, in particular, as an act of bearing witness to the sheer weirdness of mid-20th century Ireland. The LP sleeve is a Brigit’s Cross inspired by RTÉ's old typography; one song is name-checks the Angelus.

As producer Lee draws from everywhere. The ghost of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is evoked in the ominous bleeps that usher in Mister Imperator; the sinister throb underpinning Falun Gong Dancer provides a moody no-wave counterpoint to the piano ballad Coughlan layers on top.

The driving force is often Coughlan, enjoying a creative renaissance on the back of last year’s Songs of Co-Aklan. His baritone is distended into a slow-boil snarl on the cold funk of We Need while on Picadors that bristling croon hovers in isolation as he conjures with the iconography of a mundane day in Dublin (Capel Street, the Pro Cathedral etc).

The old menacing Coughlan of Fatima Mansions hasn’t entirely gone up smoke. “We started running… we started running,” he intones on Stampede, a dolorous jam that recreates the crushing mundanity of life in Seventies and Eighties Ireland.

It’s a plunge into Black Mirror uncanniness rendered all the more baleful as you realise Coughlan and Lee aren’t conjuring with some future dystopia – but summoning the reactionary spirit of a theocracy just about confined to the past. And it is one of many unnerving flourishes on a record that invites you to stand bumper to bumper at Ireland's most haunted disco.