Lankum singer Radie Peat\u2019s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low, each breath like air vibrating through the metal reeds of a harmonium. Singing Hares on the Mountain to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for 1964\u2019s Folk Roots, New Routes, Peat accompanies herself subtly on Fender Rhodes piano before adding layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. Her simple, quiet approach is consistently startling and profoundly moving.<\/p>\n
Radie Peat: No Human Tongue Can Tell album cover<\/p>\n
No Human Tongue Can Tell collects songs of female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance, although Peat only realised this, she writes in her liner notes, after limiting her choices by her \u201cown mind and abilities\u201d and \u201cpersonal preferences\u201d. Epic statements clearly aren\u2019t her bag; her gut-deep connection with songs she\u2019s sung live for years clearly matters more, with many delivered in new versions, pulsing with urgency.<\/p>\n
Willow Garden, performed in a major-key chorus by Lankum in 2017, becomes a reverb-heavy, haunting elegy, with Peat\u2019s handling of the lyric \u201cpoor little girl\u201d buckling with sadness. She paints the woman \u201changing out the wash\u201d vividly against rolling guitar arpeggios in Same Old Man, and summons oceans of yearning in the frightening Still I Love Him, a song found by fellow contemporary Irish singer John Francis Flynn, in which a woman savagely beaten by her husband remains emotionally bound to him.<\/p>\n
Just as arresting is Peat\u2019s take on Dark Horse on the Wind, Liam Weldon\u2019s 1966 lament for the lost dream of the Irish republic, written on the brink of the Troubles. \u201cNow the warriors spring from the earth \/ To maim and kill their own,\u201d Peat sings against a solid drone. John \u201cSpud\u201d Murphy\u2019s production brilliantly brings out earthy, granular details, from the sucking-in of air through Peat\u2019s concertina bellows on Cail\u00edn Deas to the disruptive thwack of Eleanor Myler\u2019s drums. How staggering for traditional songs to taste so like fresh blood: stunning, brutal and unforgettable.<\/p>\n
Also out this month<\/p>\n
Arriving alongside a self-penned anthology, Br\u00f3na McVittie\u2019s Supernatural (Company of Corkbots) is an ambitious collection of fairy songs for Samhain, with a prevailing sound that feels like a soft-folk successor to William Orbit\u2019s work for Madonna during the Frozen era. Lithuanian singer Jausm\u0117, Ukrainian bandura player Anastasiya Voytyuk and Spanish flamenco guitarist Antonia Jim\u00e9nez also make gorgeous contributions. Bird in the Belly\u2019s Only Dogs As Friends (GF*M) is another solid set of strange folk from Laura Ward and Ben Webb, lit up by warm, radio-friendly arrangements. Highlights include the rousing Go Along Bobby and the shivery Lambs. South African guitarist Guy Buttery\u2019s Improvisations from a Rural Church: Volume 1 brings the swarmandal (an Indian zither) and the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) into a succession of ambient folk explorations around a pump organ in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Listen out for bats, birds, rats, passing tractors and stormy weather adding tension and texture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lankum singer Radie Peat\u2019s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60],"class_list":["post-669833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}