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Review: Brigid Mae Power’s “Songs for You” 

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Brigid Mae Power

Brigid Mae Power’s ‘Songs for You’ is a timeless record filled with brilliant moments that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.

By Thomas Blake

Recording a cover of any reasonably well-known song is always a balancing act. How do you make something new enough for it to be worth the effort without shattering the appeal of the original? A cover, as opposed to an interpretation of a traditional song, carries with it an implicit debt to someone else’s creativity, and a corresponding duty to honour that creativity. It’s tough to get right – the deluge of frankly appalling tribute acts that have flooded the live music scene in recent years is proof enough of that – but on the rare occasions it does work, it can seem like a kind of alchemy.

On Songs for You, Brigid Mae Power has mastered that alchemy. She served notice of her ability to make other people’s material her own with a wonderful version of Tim Buckley’s I Must Have Been Blind on her 2023 album Dream from the Deep Well, and a year later, she has gone all the way with an album of nine covers. All of them are songs loved by her late father, or those she listened to while caring for him, and it is that sense of care, perhaps, that permeates these songs, and gives them an appeal far more enduring than your average cover version.

Most of them are reasonably well-known songs from the country, folk, and folk-rock neck of the woods. The main exceptions are Television’s See No Evil, which loses its New York snarl and circular riff but gains in return a newly-framed melody and a quiet kind of positive energy, and closer You Don’t Know Me, a sweet soul-pop classic made famous by Ray Charles. Power stays true to the song’s melancholy sweetness and plays subtly on its country-soul leanings. It makes for a truly timeless performance.

And that timelessness is all over the album. Power’s take on Bert Jansch’s Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning unfolds with an easy languor that becomes spine-tinglingly beautiful, indeed almost uncanny, with repeated listens. She has a knack for taking songs that could easily become cloying in the wrong hands and making out of them something feather-light but emotionally rich. Country yodeler Slim Whitman’s Rose Marie is stripped back to its essentials and becomes a kind of brief, elemental lament. Missing You, a quite brilliant modern ballad of the Irish diaspora written by Jimmy MacCarthy but made famous by Christy Moore, floats with an ethereal beauty that makes the hardships it describes all the more poignant.

The nuanced, minimal instrumental backing is a crucial part of the album’s appeal. Angel Blood (a Cass McCombs song) is backed by Power’s hazy organ; the newest song on the album, its nostalgic shimmer helps it fit right in. Walk On Out of My Mind, taken from the Waylon Jennings version, has an easy percussive clop. Roy Orbison’s In Dreams is almost impossibly laid-back, before Power’s voice rises lark-clear over the gentle strum of acoustic guitar.

Neil Young’s Mellow My Mind might be the best of all. Here, Power has achieved the trick of making me think again about a song I thought I knew inside-out: I always saw Mellow My Mind as a largely innocuous track on Tonight’s The Night, an album which has never quite got to me in the way it gets to most Young fans. Hearing Power’s version, though, has made me think again. Her voice has a unique way of highlighting a melody, and here it grapples with Young’s downbeat, burned-out original and comes up with something jewel-like and light-dappled. It’s one of many brilliant moments on a record that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.

Songs for You (20th December 2024) Self Released

Pre-Order the Digital and Vinyl: https://brigidmaepower.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-you

Source: Brigid Mae Power – Songs for You (Album Review) – KLOF Mag

Brendan Gleeson’s documentary about legendary Irish pub is airing on TV

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The film had its world premiere earlier this year.

A documentary about a legendary Irish pub produced by and starring Oscar-nominated Irish actor Brendan Gleeson will be airing on [Irish]TV later this month.

Titled Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s, the film coming to TG4 soon is about Hughes’s – the bar that was located behind the Four Courts in Smithfield, Dublin.

For decades, the venue served as a hub for traditional music before it closed its doors in 2021.

The documentary details how, in January 2022, Gleeson – who is a fiddle player and was a Hughes’s regular – met with musicians, dancers and singers in and around the pub and gathered them one last time to “recreate the magic of Hughes’s”

The plot synopsis for the documentary states:

“To some it was an unassuming pub on a side street in Dublin’s city centre. To musicians, dancers, singers and listeners, Hughes’s was a mecca of traditional music for more than 35 years.

“After it closes its doors for the final time, actor Brendan Gleeson returns to it to commemorate its invaluable legacy. In the midst of the current musical renaissance, this documentary celebrates the passionate and earnest story of an Irish cultural nucleus.”

Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s had its world premiere last March as part of the Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF).

A documentary about a legendary Irish pub starring Oscar-nominated Irish actor Brendan Gleeson will be airing on [Irish]TV later this month.

Source: Brendan Gleeson’s documentary about legendary Irish pub is airing on TV

 

Lankum’s Antidote To Alienation

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For Dublin’s folk-doom outfit Lankum, traditional Irish music sessions are the antidote to the loneliness of the modern world. In conversation with SHANE ANDERSON, band members Cormac MacDiarmada and Ian Lynch discuss transforming ancient folk songs into haunting, contemporary ballads.

By Shane Anderson

Though just banter between songs, the interaction serves as a synecdoche for the band at large: Taking traditional ballads that occasionally date back centuries, Lankum creates pieces that explore the darkness of the human experience and go against the standard narrative of Irish music, where it’s just about getting drunk and having a good “craic.” At times, the band’s sound is as heavy as a funeral procession and at others it is possessed by a raw, primal energy—thanks, in part, to the Lynch brothers’ background in the European crust punk scene. And although they’ve traded in their electric guitars for traditional instruments, such as Uillean pipes, tin whistle, fiddle, and harmonium, the band nevertheless upends tradition, stripping down the ancient folk songs and rebuilding them with haunting harmonies and dense droning soundscapes that are sweeping festivals and stages across the world, earning them the Guardian’s 2023 best album accolades for their album False Lankum (2023). In this interview with Shane Anderson, band members Cormac MacDiarmada and Ian Lynch explain why traditional Irish music sessions are the antidote to the loneliness of the modern world.

SHANE ANDERSON: The band name used to be Lynched, which was in reference to the last name of two members in your band, but you changed it because you felt it might be offensive to some listeners. Why did you choose the name Lankum?

CORMAC MACDIARMADA: We were on tour in Europe when we landed on Lankum after talking about the name change for a good couple of years. There were hundreds of hundreds of names suggested but Lankum was the one we all agreed on.

IAN LYNCH: We were very fond of a certain recording of a ballad called “False Lankum.” The recording was made by a Traveler singer called John Reilly Jr. in the 1960s in Ireland. He sang this very elaborate, lengthy ballad and the villain of the piece is called False Lankum. It’s kind of like the bogeyman in the story and it goes to a castle to murder everyone, including the children. It turns out that the False Lankum is the one who built the castle and was never paid for his hard work.

SA: So, the song has a very political dimension to it. And it seems to me this could be said of a lot of your work.

IL: It’s just something there in the music. Folk and traditional music is the music of the people.

SA: How do you find the songs you record?

CM: There are loads of different ways. The one thing about music like this is that it’s very much a living tradition, it’s very much in a constant flow. What I mean is it’s not a relic. It’s thriving. It’s very social and vibrant. It’s in the pubs we would have gone to, all the singers circles in and around Dublin as well as in other parts of the country. In the olden days, we would go and play a session, an informal gathering of musicians, after a gig.

SA: Your sound has changed a lot over the past ten years. What brought about this change?

CM: One of the key things with the last two albums in particular was getting our producer, John “Spud” Murphy, who plays with us now, too. He was on the Dublin Irish scene for a long time and recorded a lot of amazing records. And he brought a different energy that hugely boosts our sound. When we are recording something and are making arrangements now, we’re like, “OK, this is really good, but it’s going to be absolutely stratospheric once he gets his hands on it.”

IL: I think trying to constantly evolve that element of the band’s sound that is darkly meditative is what drives us. But I do think there were certain things we were trying to do previously that were in this direction. Even tracks on Cold Old Fire, say, the middle segment of “Tri-Coloured House,” or, later on, the drone underpinning “Déanta in Éireann” or “What Will We Do When We Have No Money?” We were trying to delve more into doom and drone there and do it with our traditional instruments, but we hit a brick wall before we met “Spud” since these instruments are used in a very specific way.

SA: Another part of your process that interests me is that you decided to record a little-known version of “Wild Rover.” It’s very different than The Dubliner’s version, which feels like Ireland’s second national anthem. Could you talk about that choice and deciding to go against the grain?

CM: When we found that song, it was a bit of a revelation. We were all like, “fucking hell, this is unbelievable.” And that’s half the battle. Once you find one of those songs, it creates a collective energy and drive.

IL: I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people are very sick of that standard version of “Wild Rover.” And so, it’s really nice to bring a different version of the song and use that as an example to say, “Look, a lot of these big traditional songs used to exist in so many different variations around the world. This is only one version and there’s a lot more out there, you just have to dig deeper.” I made a podcast episode about “Wild Rover,” and there are hundreds of versions of that song that exist all around the world. But because of the nature of the recording industry in the 20th century and the nature of mainstream music, when one song is recorded and becomes a hit, it halts this very natural process of variation and evolution that happens to traditional songs when they’re allowed to just exist in their own way in the world. The way that traditional songs change and vary and evolve and travel around the world is important to talk about.

SA: So, it’s about offering a counter-narrative to the boisterous drinking song that is well known?

CM: 100 percent. And you know, the lyrics are fucking depressing. They’re about someone descending into alcoholism and having a huge degree of regret. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a place to have the contrast between the darkest, saddest lyrics with a quite upbeat and merry tune, like in the American Old Time tradition, but we wanted to recontextualize something that is very much a mainstay of the tradition and is done quite a lot and give it a different energy.

SA: What was the reaction like?

IL: I think a lot of people were like, “Holy shit, I’ve heard that song so much throughout my life and I never even realized that it was a song about a person whose life has been ruined by alcoholism and now they have all this regret of a life that’s spent away, and they wish it had been different.” I think people found that really refreshing. I don’t think it would have been the same if we had recorded the “Wild Rover” that everybody knows. The way Irish music has been packaged and sold by the industry is a very one-sided view. It’s all very happy go lucky. We’re all drunk and having a good time. And when we do that, it sounds like this.

As far as we’re concerned, that’s not true to the tradition at all. If you’ve spent time investigating traditional music and song, you find that every single aspect of life is described and comes out in the songs. There are all these other emotions that can be expressed by the music as well.

CM: There is a huge variety out there. I live in Sligo, which has a population of 50,000. A couple of musicians I never met before came to a session that we play regularly and I didn’t know a single tune they played. It’s probably indicative of how huge amount out there and how the repertoire changes from county to county.

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Review: Myles O’Reilly’s “Music from the Threshold”

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By Thomas Blake Traumatic events can sometimes change lives in unexpected ways. In Myles O’Reilly’s case, suffering a serious accident and spending over a year in recovery provided a pathway for his discovery of ambient music. Up until that point, his musical output had focussed predominantly on pop and folk idioms (he was once the guiding light in the Brad Pitt-endorsed Irish underground indie-pop act Juno Falls). He is still capable of writing luminous, gem-like folk songs of the highest quality – see 2022’s Cocooning Heart for proof of that – but he has also developed a parallel career as a purveyor of gauzy, dreamlike ambient instrumentals. Music from the Threshold is the latest in a clutch of compositional albums and the most varied and emotionally resonant yet.

The compositions seem to take inspiration from both Western and Eastern ambient music. At times, they are thick and earthy, with the deep sheen of polished mahogany. At times, they are minimal and chilly. Frequently, the two strands combine to create a sound that has echoes of Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2013 collaborative album, Disappearance. It’s a delicate balance, achieved with apparent effortlessness. Household Chores, for example, pits tinkling, icy top notes against a resonant and oaky background ambience.

Although meditative to its core, there is a paradoxical liveliness to many of O’Reilly’s compositions that is unusual in ambient music. It is fitting that the album is inspired partly by the death of O’Reilly’s cat: cats can change on a whim from the laziest to the liveliest of animals, and this split personality makes its way into these soundscapes in the form of Watching the Beautiful Game’s skittering, popping electronics and hazy, slightly decayed background notes. Movement is an important feature. Guiso Walks the Kerry Way is rangy and exploratory in a way that ambient music normally isn’t, but it never forsakes its calmness.

The way these tracks are built and layered means that each has its own distinct profile, which means that the mood changes subtly from piece to piece. A Holy Tone, as its name suggests, is reverent, dense, though not without a sense of play and an engaging twitchiness. The melodic overtones of Midnight Art Attack have a drifting, dreamlike quality, improvisational and random-sounding, like the musical equivalent of automatic writing. Noah Under the Stairs is sinuous and soothing, its tones rippling out in restful contours while the underside grows staticky and papery.

The Visible Soul of the House is perhaps the album’s most dramatic moment: drawn-out synth chords build and shift, hinting at the monumental. The track seems to inhabit deep time, to examine a hyper-extended moment from the perspective of an apparently inanimate object. It is also the most cinematic piece: O’Reilly is a filmmaker, and the whole album has a vivid visual sense but here it becomes more noticeably filmic, more structural, even introducing the eerie idea of a narrative just beyond comprehension. For all its calming qualities, ambient music has the ability to capture strange and uncanny life forces, to tell stories in a deeper and more enigmatic way than with simple human language. It seeps into the cracks between states of consciousness and merges the states of dreaming and wakefulness, life and death.

Myles O’Reilly seems to understand this uncanny power innately, and he puts it to mesmerising use on Music From the Threshold. The final track, One Last Loving Gaze, is short, sad, and almost entirely still. It is a fond but aching farewell, and like everything O’Reilly does here, it is suffused with grace and dignity, strangeness and quiet passion.

*** Music from the Threshold LISTEN to album tracks via Bandcamp ***

Source: Myles O’Reilly – Music from the Threshold (Album review) – KLOF Mag