The Irish renaissance rallies ever onward, with doomcore acapella quartet Landless adding sparse and spare instrumentation to their timeless darkness.

Release Date: 7th June 2024

Label: Glitterbeat

Format: CD / vinyl / digital

One thing the Irish tradition seldom embraces is jollity and joy, as even the drinking songs carry an undercurrent of despair. Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch relish in this dankness, their spooky chorale a shiver up, down and back up any spines encountered along their way. With melancholy, love, death and mystery the core source material, some subtle instrumentation adds to the scene of doom, courtesy the production of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, who does the same for Lankum. Cormac MacDiarmada, from the same band, is also one of the accompanists, adding some trademark flourishes of his own.

Opener, Newry Highwayman, opens with the sole voice of Meir, ahead each her bandmates joining, separately and collectively, with altogether eerie outcome. The range of voices is wide, giving a sense of near polyphony, not unlike the Bulgarian women’s choir of La Mystère Des Voix Bulgares. A tremulous drawn out note from Alex Borwick’s trombone combines with a drone of strings from MacDiarmada. An auspicious start, which leads into another staple of the Irish tradition, Blackwaterside. The depth and width of voicespan is awesome. Perhaps not the version known to most, this is a version learnt from the traveler, Paddy Doran, and needs no additional sounds to rack up the spinal shivers.

Next up is a piece commissoned by RTE, the Irish broadcaster. Lúireach Bhríde is about Brigid, the pre-existing pagan goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. (Lúireach has two meanings, meaning either a breastplate, or a protective prayer or hymn. It makes some sense that the two align.) An influence, well ahead of St Patrick’s alleged bringing of Christianity to the island, it is another deliciously spooky rendition, set only to pipe organ, Ruth Clinton, and the wavering strings of MacDiarmid. It is six minutes well spent, if you wish to scare yourself silly.

That influence, we are told, lingers long. You would imagine Ewan MacColl’s The Fisherman’s Wife to be much safer ground, but, set over a repetitive piano note, it exudes much the same sense of fear and trepidation. Uncertain quite where one voice starts, and another ends, it is best to think the four singers as different notes all on a shared instrument. And, in six or so months that seem awash with Selkies from Sule Skerry, what with Chloe Matharu and Hildaland, the quartet now add a further version, this time a grey one and perhaps the most unnerving of the trio. Pump organ, rather than the earlier pipe, comes again from Ruth Clinton, MacDiarmada providing a further dense drone, and what, lyrically, should offer some future hope, sounds more a threat. The final stanza gets the additional benefit of ‘singing bowls’, played by Meir. This sound, of a Tibetan monastery, adds a spectacularly ethereal extra level.

You might know what you’re getting with Death And The Lady, and, to a point, you wouldn’t be wrong, but the chill factor is still amplified against the starker presentations offered ever by Norma Waterson, or indeed her daughter. Pipe organ again the backdrop, the four women channel a mix of the Morai and of the Sirens. If you are still sitting comfortably, maybe your immersion is insufficient. When the organ note bleeds downward, at the end, it is truly remarkable. It then comes a slight surprise as clavichord strikes up a stately and courtly beginning to The Hag, the setting of a poem by 17th century poet, Robert Herrick. The singing here is perhaps the most conventional, structurally, the harmonies rich. Whether the hag is the same hag as in the jig, Old Hag You Have Killed Me, whilst there is certainly nothing jiggy going on, it wouldn’t surprise me.

My Lagan Love is positively jolly by comparison, with, again, the harmonies rich. Warm, even, this time, the mournful cadences managing a lighter message than in the preceding darknesses ahead this dawn. Any accompaniment would be superfluous. But MacDiarmada and Clinton do return, for another poem, The Wounded Hussar, to an arrangement by Rita Gallagher, the inspirational and prize-winning singer from Donegal. With MacDiarmada’s fiddle scratching like some angry wasps, the presentation is possibly the most easiest for unsuspecting consumption. Finally, and possibly surprisingly, the closing track, Ej Husari, leaves the Irish tradition far behind it, if only to confirm the universal language of lamentation. The structure and arrangement is little different, and just as reliant on drone tones as many the songs earlier. An altogether fitting end to and album that drips an “other” authenticity, the sort only recently seeming to become untapped, and is as apart from the fiddle-de-dee or any paddywhackery Irish music as can be.

Don’t listen too late at night and leave a light on.

Here is The Fisherman’s Wife:

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