Our Song of the Day [that day being August 10, 2014 – Hobbledehoy] is a beautiful unreleased improv from what would have been the second album from The A. Lords. Like their first album released in July 2011 on Rif Mountain, which sold out soon after, each track ‘was a very slow and deliberate paean to the oft maligned (and rightly so) fields of Dorset.’ This is so tranquil & serene.
By Folk Radio UK
The A. Lords was a project started by Nicholas Palmer and Michael Tanner. Nicholas is better known for making short elaborate instrumental music as Directorsound and Michael has a history of making longer, gloomier pieces as Plinth. The A. Lords peversely straddle the two, looking down at us with an expression of woe. Although their eponymous debut was released in 2011 the recordings that featured go back several years prior.
The Mercury-nominated four-piece play every song as if they’re fighting with it, gasping for air before verses
By Katie Hawthorne
A menacing rumble fills the Queen’s Hall. Four empty chairs line the front of the stage, crowded by instruments: fiddles, guitars, hand organs, pipes, pedals, a harmonium. Slowly, the rumble builds into a fidgety clatter, as if a ghostly orchestra is preparing to play, and Lankum walk on stage, their first notes bleeding into the din.
Such eerie theatre is a fitting introduction to the Dublin folk band, who turn traditional songs into fresh horrors and write stormy, gothic elegies to modern life which already feel centuries old. Their latest album, the Mercury prize-nominated False Lankum, is bound together by similarly haunted atmospherics, and yet it still feels a surprise when the band – Radie Peat, Cormac Mac Diarmada and brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch – pull their first song proper out of this mist.
They have a ferocious physicality to their musicianship, and although Daragh describes new (old) song The New York Trader as a “workout, every time”, just moments later he is hunched over his guitar with a violin bow, sawing as if cutting a thick rope. The Rocky Road to Dublin is sung with such intensity that the band collectively gasps for air before each verse, both meditative and ominous. The weather worsens further for The Pride of Petravore: pipes roar and Mac Diarmada’s fiddle turns into a horrifying groan.
Then, as if the evening has been breezy entertainment until now, Peat offers a blunt warning: “We wrote this one during level-five lockdown. Probably why it’s so intense.” Go Dig My Grave is the showstopper of False Lankum, a bone-crunchingly heavy ballad about love and death. Peat’s astonishing voice cuts through the dark, and the song builds around her: four-piece harmonies, guitar strummed like a funeral march, and a doom-laden siren with the circular swing of a lighthouse’s beam.
“We always sing, even when we’re losing,” goes their first single Cold Old Fire. This mix of grief and joy is why some songs live so long, and to close the night Lankum offers the latter: a rowdy version of Bear Creek has the audience whooping and stamping in cleansing release.
Here are The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan performing “The Ying Tong Song.” You will either forever love me or hate me for delivering you this precious British earworm.
The Goon Show was an extremely influential British radio comedy program, broadcast by the BBC throughout of the 1950s. John Lennon once said, “I could go on all day about the Goons and their influence on a generation” – high praise from a jealous guy.
Wrote NY Times in 1972 : “Goon comedy was in equal parts the harmless violence of Warner Brothers cartoons, the wordplay of James Joyce and the lowbrow japes of the English music hall.”
Monty Python’s Terry Jones has called The Goon’s Spike Milligan ”the father of Monty Python.” John Cleese called him the ”great god of us all.”
Without diluting their power or abandoning their gothic intensity, the Dublin group’s fourth album lulls the listener with songs of exquisite softness and deeply affecting harmony
By Jude Rogers
Lankum’s fourth album goes to new extremes, and not simply by dredging more trenches of their trademark gothic intensity. Four years after 2019’s raw-skinned The Livelong Day, with its exploratory epics, False Lankum teems with similar moments of iridescent bliss. But the 12 tracks here also unfurl into each other without a break, alternately lulling the listener then casting them into storms of shuddering sounds.
Recorded in Dublin’s Hellfire Studio by day, while the band spent their nights sleeping in a Martello tower on the coast, False Lankum begins with Radie Peat, the best folk singer of our times, instructing us to Go Dig My Grave. When Peat sings she magically straddles realities, sounding both like an uncompromising everywoman and a mystical instrument of bellows and reeds – a magic she employs to spiritual effect on the beautiful 17th-century ballad Newcastle.
Lankum: The New York Trader – video
Other tracks, such as Netta Perseus and Clear Away in the Morning (by US folklorist Gordon Bok), underline the band’s incredible facility with harmony. Their version of the latter is as accessible as Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, full of exquisite softness – at least until their take on Master Crowley’s arrives, a menacing concertina reel that sounds precision-tooled to jar devils awake.
There is so much to revel in here: three instrumental fugues that are more about atmospheric discombobulation than repetition; Cormac Mac Diarmada’s sweet vocal debut on Child ballad Lord Abore and Mary Flynn; their deeply affecting turn through Cyril Tawney’s On a Monday Morning; the way hurdy-gurdies, hammered dulcimers and bowed piano strings create enveloping filmic canvases.
On recent form, Lankum could have become a hardcore drone band very easily, but they’ve done something braver by allowing their gentler sides a bold voice in the mix, while managing not to dilute their power or compromise their ambition. With a 3,300-capacity Roundhouse date later this year, they remain a radical band while making music that is reaching out to the mainstream – while also giving off the thrilling sense that there is so much more to come.
