It seems Irish music is having something of a renaissance at the moment. Or maybe it just seems like that to those of us in the UK who have not being paying attention over the last ten years or so. Okay, it’s probably the latter, let’s face it.
Bands as diverse as Fontaines DC, The Mary Wallopers and Kneecap have been forging a path that pays little heed to the commercial realities of popular music in Britain, or for that matter the US. And that is a good thing. Which brings me to the current Irish folk scene that seems to be leading the vanguard in this respect.
Those who have been paying attention will be familiar with Dublin’s dark and gloomy folk legends Lankum, the aforementioned Mary Wallopers and Carlow duo Ye Vagabonds. In addition we have the Lankum associated projects ØXN and One Leg One Eye. Before I get on to review One Leg One Eye’s latest album, can I just say that all these bands are brilliant, and you should check them out right now if you haven’t already.
One Leg One Eye are the folk-adjacent ambient drone project of George Brennan (BB84, Melodica Deathship) and Lankum’s Ian Lynch. Their first album, 2022’s …And Take The Black Worm With Me was a wild and eerie, darkly psychedelic drone folk album, but it was still anchored, somewhere, to a traditional Irish sound, pivoting around the three vocal tracks that formed its spine, culminating in the excellent — and one day to be used in a thousand folk horror soundtracks — “Only The Diceys”.
Thematically, and if the song titles are anything to go by, the album is inspired by tales from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. As the album title itself suggests, these themes often appear to revolve around female archetypes – the crone, the witch, the war goddess.
Opener “Many Are My Names Besides” is a slow-building terrifying slab of industrial noise, overlaid with the chanted curse of Calib, a haggard crone, in reality the actor and director Olwen Fouéré, depicting a scene from the Cycle’s “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel”. The hag delivers the long list of her names in chilling monotone. The next two tracks also take their names from the Cycle, the first of these, “Neither Fell Nor Flesh”, a fifteen-minute epic of ominous drone seething over a maelstrom of leviathan-like bass, the sound invoking an almost Lovecraftian atmosphere of cosmic dread.
Final track “What I Shall Follow, I Shall Hunt” verges on the indescribable. It appears to use, primarily at least, found sounds to evoke a rural industrial atmosphere, an agricultural dystopia with drones derived from snoring livestock and battered tractors to create an otherworldly sonic texture suggesting sleeping horrors to be awakened.
Overall, it’s a fascinating album. I’m not sure it quite matches up to …And Take The Black Worm With Me, but then I don’t think it’s trying to. Neither is it really a follow up, more of a companion piece if anything. What One Leg One Eye do next, whether they try to synthesise the abstract mythology-inspired work of this album with the more folk-derived palate of …And Take The Black Worm With Me or move in a completely different direction, will be interesting to see.I will leave the reader with one suggestion. This is an album best played in the dark.
-Dave Pettit-
