Gig review: Lankum play stirring set at sold-out Cork Opera House
Lankum in concert at the Opera House, Cork on Saturday. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
★★★★☆
Jazz piano power trio the Bad Plus were once lauded for their “avant-garde populism”, an acknowledgement that their music was as appealing and accessible as it was radical and forward-thinking.
The same sobriquet might equally well be applied today to Lankum. On the one hand, the similarly exploratory and collectivist Dublin quartet is thrillingly committed to pushing boundaries and bridging genres – the band boasts a complex Venn diagram of influences that includes punk, krautrock, psychedelia, dark ambient and heavy metal, with a deep and wide-ranging love of folk and trad at its intersecting centre.
On the other hand, Lankum’s approach has been increasingly acclaimed and audience-pleasing. This concert was the first of two quickly sold-out shows at the Cork Opera House (one, admittedly, rescheduled from pandemic-hit St Patrick’s Day in 2020); in December the band will play to almost 3,000 people at the Roundhouse in London. Like Radiohead and Björk before them, it seems the further Lankum experiment and explore, the more successful they become.
Live, all these dichotomies and dissonances come brilliantly to the fore.
As they walk onstage the band are greeted by an exuberant Saturday night Cork crowd almost like visiting American rock stars. Yet, as Lankum settle into their seats with various drones and distortions building around them, and fiddle player Cormac Mac Diarmada bows a sliding, scraping alarm call of a broken chord that announces one of their most affecting tunes, a reimagining of much travelled standard ‘The Wild Rover’, the mood becomes instantly more mournful and reflective, Radie Peat’s stark and penetrating vocals filling the auditorium with intense longing and regret – “And I never will be called the/Wild rover no more”.
Contrast is, in a way, Lankum’s calling card. At the heart of the band is both a love of close four-part vocal harmonies – perhaps it helps that Ian and Daragh Lynch are brothers – and an understanding that less is very often more. The band’s tender reading of ‘On a Monday Morning’, for example, is an exercise in dramatic restraint.
Lankum can’t resist, however, adding layers and complexities. If ‘Go Dig My Grave’, one of the highlights of new album False Lankum, doesn’t quite reach the devastating darkness and disturbing depths of the studio-engineered version, the band more than compensates with the low rumbles and thunderous reverberations of ‘The Pride of Petravore’, Percy French’s sprightly air transformed miraculously into a menacing dirge.
“Been waiting three years to do this gig,” Radie Peat said towards the beginning of the show. An hour and a half or so later, after a rousing encore which had the audience on their feet, there can’t have been many in the Opera House who didn’t feel the long delay was well worth it.
