Album review: False Lankum gives a true picture of the group's incredible talents
Lankum release their fourth album, False Lankum. Picture: Sorcha Frances Ryder
- Lankum
- False Lankum
- Rough Trade
- ★★★★★
Lankum’s fourth album starts simply enough. For the first minute of the opening track, a radical reimagining of suicide ballad ‘Go Dig My Grave’, Radie Peat’s voice is nakedly unaccompanied and characteristically unadorned.
Her rendering of the song’s first verse and chorus is at once chilling and tender, a young girl’s heartbreaking cry-from-beyond, “To tell this world/ That I died for love”. It is fierce and fragile, visceral and blackly beautiful – contradictory moods that Peat, one of the great modern voices in folk or any other music, seems supremely gifted to impart.
Gradually, funereal bell-like repetitions, desolate twangs and eerie echoes enter the mix until, at around four minutes, the song seems done. What happens in the almost five minutes that remain – inspired, Lankum have explained, “by the Irish tradition of keening, a form of lament for the deceased” – will, I suspect, determine your response to the entire album.
The devastating song soon becomes ruptured by screeching chords, thunderous percussion, siren calls and dissonant alarms, and the mood becomes altogether more unsettling. It’s like an immersive journey into the underworld: dark, disturbing, even downright dangerous.
The sense of an undertow is present on much of False Lankum, and not just because many of the 12 songs relate to the sea. On tracks such as ‘Clear Away in the Morning’, ‘The New York Trader’, and ‘Netta Perseus’ – one of two originals written by guitarist and vocalist Daragh Lynch – there is a growing feeling of watery submersion, of a turbulence lurking just below the surface, of an awesome force pulling you ever further down.
Parts of the album reminded me of the reverberating disquiet of Gavin Bryars’s experimental masterwork The Sinking of the Titanic – yet equally, and especially on the epic 13-minute closing track ‘The Turn’, of such decidedly unfolk-like forms as krautrock, psychedelia, drone metal, dark ambient and avant-jazz. There are also three short intermissions or ‘Fugues’ – abstract soundscapes that only further dislocate.
Elsewhere, perhaps reassuringly, there is light, shade and sweet-sounding melodies, even songs that might make you tap your foot. The Dublin quartet’s version of the reel ‘Master Crowley’s’, for example, is largely lively and uplifting – yet also entirely Lankum’s ambitious and adventurous own.
Far more menacing, intense and delicate than its game-changing predecessor The Livelong Day, and a more complete whole, this is an extraordinary multi-layered triumph of a record, both firmly rooted and thrillingly free-moving.
- Lankum’s upcoming gigs include Cork Opera House May 20 + 24; Vicar Street, Dublin, May 29-31
