Lankum raised the bar exponentially with their last album, The Livelong Day, released in 2019. Its postapocalyptic soundscape propelled listeners into all manner of alternative universes, most of them deliciously doom-laden and bathed in the richest of crepuscular arrangements. Four years and one global pandemic on, they’re back with a vengeance, but this time around they’ve chosen to balance the darkness with copious shafts of light and delicate beauty.
Radie Peat’s raw, uncompromising vocals are still one of Lankum’s finest calling cards. The album’s first single, Go Dig My Grave, is a perfect illustration of the way those inimitable vocals can transform a folk song with a centuries-old backstory. Where previously the lyric might have been couched in soothing arrangements, Lankum’s approach is to amplify its deathly intent.
Netta Perseus, one of two new original songs written by Darragh Lynch, hints at an unexpected kinship with Leonard Cohen, with its linear melody lines, but it occupies a more sinister space where the fittingly opaque lyrics ricochet off one another.
The band have a tendency to take traditional tunes by the throat, wringing entirely new universes from their bones. They continue in this vein on False Lankum with their inclusion of a set titled Master Crowley’s, a two-part reel learned from Noel Hill, with baritone concertina from Cormac Begley and with Sadhbh Peat lending a third concertina to the fray. It all results in a dervish-like take on a tune that ably stands up to the left-field treatment.
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The biggest surprise of this magnificent collection, though, is the lightness of touch evident on the Francis James Child ballad Lord Abore and Mary Flynn, with Lankum’s fiery fiddle player, Cormac MacDiarmada, taking lead vocals for the first time. His sweet vocals, countered by Radie Peat’s perfectly pitched harmonies, tell a tale with elegance and poise, and are quite possibly the biggest reveal of all, promising to become the Little Musgrave of this generation.
Producer Spud Murphy knits disparate elements together seamlessly through the introduction of three fugues that play knowingly on the altered mental state that they conjure, while Darragh Lynch’s second song, Turn, closes the collection with a question mark befitting the strange times we live in. Ian Lynch’s bare-boned reading of Cyril Tawney’s On a Monday Morning is equally spellbinding.
This collection positions Lankum in a space that’s utterly their own: delighting in the myriad influences that colour their sound – from English and Scottish folk to Irish traditional, death metal, Krautrock and ambient – but never corralling them into a single one.
