Equally inspired and inspiring, history and interpretation blur for a collective assault on the senses, with the most gentle of blows.

Re-Release Date : 20th June 2025

Label : Dimple Discs/BYOH

Format : Vinyl (and, via Bandcamp, CD / Digital)

Were you?

It is possible you were paying attention when this was originally released, in only a limited CD edition. If your filter is primed up and ready for “song cycles based on historical sources, and to reinterpret song material rooted in the history of 19th century Ireland and of the Irish diaspora“, you’ll be familiar with it. But, blink, and you may have missed it, and so, like me, be grateful for the hand of Bring Your Own Hammer (BYOH), a new imprint, for drawing it to unrealised attention. The title of the project comes from the name of a poem by Douglas Hyde, a noted Irish writer, scholar, and politician, 1860-1949. He is best known as a key figure in the Gaelic Revival.

Newly available on vinyl, with other platforms still in existence, BYOH define themselves more as a faction, rather than band, group, ensemble or even collective. For this, their first, release, the faction includes such luminaries as Cathal Coughlan, Adrian Crowley, Brigid Mae Power and Jah Wobble, each and others utilising material drawn from the tradition, from documents and letters. For all that, the music is esentially timeless, mainly electronic and ambient.

Strictures broken, a dense broth

Singer Michelle O’Rourke is up first, accompanying herself on a glacial keyboard, sounding more like harp than keys, with a sparse and repetitive descending line, that draws you inward. O’Rourke’s usual home is the Irish National Opera, not that you’d guess, with enough character to break free the strictures, most of them, of the trained technique opera can often attract. The song is likely ancient, collected and translated, into English, by the same Douglas Hyde, in the late 1800s. Double tracking of her voice flits in and out, and it is a thoroughly sepulchral listen.

The contrast then, as the booming baritone of Adrian Crowley booms in, for Golden Streets, Bitter Tears, is huge. With phrases lifted from the letters sent back home to Ireland, as emigrants played down their struggle, his voice is a dense and rich broth, delivering just the falsehoods family would wish to hear. With a backdrop of mellotronic strings and piano, Brigid Mae Power adds harmonies that heighten the sense of deception, shared by both sides. It is a song of ponderous beauty.

shimmering electronica

Carol Keogh, a Dublin singer songwriter with a penchant for chamber gothic, picks up the reins for the flickering A Pair Of Packed Valises (Before The Dunbrody), an imagining of the journey of two of her forbears made on the boat of that name, their names plucked from the existing passener list, ahead their escape the great famine. A song of faint hope, it carries echoes of the shimmering electronica of Dot Allison.

As to what became of them on embarkation, the trail runs dry of other than the vaguest of hints as to their destinies. It’s short, ending almost abruptly, The gap is swiftly filled by the denser atmospheric of Old Oak Road. Cathal Coughlan intones a doomy narrative over a synthetic mix of keys and FX, from Mike Smalle, a Galway musician who has collaborated with Mark Eitzel. The bass of Jah Wobble is far more subdued than usual expectation, but nonetheless bobbles and burbles about the mix with threatening intent. It is as cheerless as any song about infanticide, or suspected infanticide might be, the electronic beats a satisfying shudder.

A litany of suffering, electric alchemy

Coughlan sticks around for The Man With Open Arms, the imagining this time the return home, to Co. Carlow, of a blind and elderly man, after a lifetime of menial service in the British Navy of the early 19th century. By now you will be getting the gist of this project, largely a litany of of suffering. This one, oddly, is almost in the style of a black and white Hollywood musical, if one of the sad songs, clearly. Linda Buckley adds suitable harmonies to fulfil the dystopic vision. Whether it works or not, tolling bell and all, depends on whether you feel it is supposed to. I’m still uncertain.

One we know now, The Female Cabin Boy, a venerable ballad covered (again, in his case) so recently by Martin Carthy, if in its Handsome Cabin Boy guise. But rather than Eliza’s hearty sawing, here the arrangement is all moody melodrama, with Eileen Gogan and Neil Farrell wielding all sort of electric alchemy, with guitars and keys, together bringing out a smudge of a slightly earthier Kate Bush to the proceedings, vocally and sonically. It is a high point, with the swell maintained for the evocative Embarkation (Float Away), introduced by dockside sound of waves and gulls. The singer Agu here channels more of a Hazel O’Connor, and it is a twisted wraith of industrial sound and eerie ethereal sonars, courtesy Tony Higgins. Another short piece, it is more atmospherics than anything to hum or sing to.

unctuous shimmering splendour

Some warm brass envelops the gentle beats and electric piano of Over The Ghosts, which has Mike Smalle again at the helm, with a warm vocal from Wally Nkikita. Strings caress this tale of the reverse journey to most here, from the U.S. to Ireland, a former slave fleeing for a better life in Galway. Of course it doesn’t end well, but it is perhaps the most reflectful song here, the trumpet and flugelhorn of Daniel Guinnane a gloriously soothing balm. It is Smalle again for the more meditative The Oscillating Sea, as guitar and electronics merge to imagine some dead calm, mid-ocean.

…Or possibly just a bridge from the woozy sway of Nkikita’s vocal before it and of Michael J. Sheehy’s closing track. Sheehy, once of 90’s London band, Dream City Film Club, has one of those wobbly tenors, somewhere between Orbison and Ferry, and he imparts a shimmering splendour to the traditionally derived song, The Weight Of Water. The string arrangement, by Fiona Brice, is unctuous, with Brigid Mae Power returning for some background vocal. A good and decent conclusion.

surprising and ambitious

This is a surprising and ambitious record, and one that manages to find a the point of intersection between the polish of 4AD style 80’s pomp and the Irish Folk tradition, with a few tickles in from elsewhere too. The liner notes expand on the origin and/or derivations of each the songs, inviting also the listener to imagine the scenario that might best fit each. If this is the first from this faction, I wonder what else we can expect. Many of the names are new to me, but seem mainly to exist in the fertile world where the boundaries between genre can be blurred, drawn now more to my mainstream attention.

Try Over The Ghosts for size:

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