Dublin

Lankum returns with new single and video ‘Ghost Town’

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Since 2014’s Cold Old Fire, Lankum’s debut album as a four-piece, the Dublin band have gone on to release three studio albums on Rough Trade Records – including The Livelong Day and False Lankum, which both won the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year. Lankum released a live album, Live in Dublin, in June 2024.

They were set for a North American autumn 2025 tour, but had to cancel due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’.

It’s an honour to be releasing a version of this iconic tune, and it feels eerily relevant to be referencing yet again themes of urban decay, economic hardship and working class frustration. – Lankum

Lankum "Ghost Town"

Most recently, their track ‘The Granite Graze’ off of their 2017 record Between The Earth and Sky, was featured on Netflix’s House of Guinness soundtrack, which premiered last month.

Record Review: Macdara Yeates’ “Traditional Singing from Dublin”

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Possessed of a crystal-clear voice with echoes of the style of Luke Kelly and the emotional depth-charge of Liam Weldon, Yeates’s full-bodied singing is never anything but his own

By Siobhán Long

Raucous, bawdy, reflective and wistful in turn, Macdara Yeates’s solo debut is a robust collection in which this Dublin singer revisits age-old tales and renders them anew with his own unforced imprint.

As a founder member of the Cobblestone singing session The Night Before Larry Got Stretched (as well as being a member of Skippers Alley), Yeates has a well-established pedigree in singing circles, but unlike his peers in Lankum, Landless and Ye Vagabonds, along with his erstwhile bandmates John Francis Flynn and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, he’s taken his own sweet time to let the songs gestate.

Yeates is possessed of a crystal-clear voice that contains echoes of the declamatory style of Luke Kelly and the emotional depth-charge of Liam Weldon, yet his full-bodied singing is never anything but his own. Light on decoration, Yeates favours a bareboned setting for most of his chosen songs, with many sung solo, and those that invite his own accompaniment on bodhrán and guitar are adorned with only the subtlest backdrop, reminiscent of the buoyant touch beloved of the late Dennis Cahill.

Yeates delights as much in the nonsense of his own version of The Herrin’ as he does in the poignant emigration song The Shores of Lough Bran (learned from the Connemara singer Sarah Ghriallais) and Dominic Behan’s Our Last Hope. Yeates’s colour palette is richly hued, thanks to the welcoming gabháil of his song book, where borrowings from Frank Harte, Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, Luke Kelly, Séamus Ennis and others coalesce to form a highly cohesive whole.

In a golden age for traditional singing in Ireland, Yeates’s debut comes as a further welcome affirmation that the torch is being passed to a generation who truly understand and value its worth, while acknowledging that they are not afraid to inhabit it with their own particular voice. Traditional Singing from Dublin is a candid, clear-eyed and uncluttered snapshot from a singer who is finally stepping into the spotlight.

Source: Macdara Yeates: Traditional Singing from Dublin – Passing of the torch in city’s vocal tradition – The Irish Times

Myles O’Reilly “Her First Crios” [An Ode To Soft Landings]

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By Myles O’Reilly

Myles O’Reilly performs ‘Her First Crios’ while Aideen Macken hand weaves a traditional Irish waist belt called a Crios. ‘Her First Crios’ is featured on the new album from Myles O’Reilly’s [Indistinct Chatter] series of ambient works titled ‘An Ode To Soft Landings’ https://mylesoreilly.bandcamp.com/alb…

“A ‘Crios’, pronounced ‘Kriss’ is a type of hand woven waist belt that was commonly worn in Ireland for many thousands of years. Sadly during British occupation they were banned, and the tradition died out. Each Irish family would have had their own unique pattern. Knowledge of how to weave the family Crios would have been handed down from generation to generation.

Christmas 2021 for Aideen and I was bit rough. We both had Covid. Thankfully my present to Aideen was a small weaving loom. She had only recently joined The Liberties Weavers @thelibertiesweavers, a local organisation dedicated to reviving some of inner city Dublin’s old weaving traditions. Where we live in Dublin 8 was for hundreds of years was the weaving mecca of the country. It’s here that Aideen learned of the Crios and how to make one.

This film is a document of how we spend a lot of our days at home. I’m making music upstairs and Aideen is weaving downstairs. The cats look on. It details the exact process we both go through in practising our new found crafts. The song I’m playing titled ‘Her First Crios’ is the current ambient manifestation of a song ‘The Most Colorful Thread In The Loom’ from the album I released earier this year, the video of which I posted here. It is what the tune has evolved in to now. The emotions from that song, dedicated to Aideen and her weaving, put under the microscope. A deeper and totally instrumental dive in to those feelings, moulded from the same intentions.”