The first signing in 18 years to the recently revived Irish traditional label Claddagh Records, ØXN are a band that named themselves after castrated draft animals – “sometimes worshipped, sometimes doomed for domestication,” they say. ØXN don’t trip around in folk’s gentler pastures. They comprise singer/keyboardist/guitarist Katie Kim, drummer Eleanor Myler of experimental rock band Percolator, and two members of the Mercury-nominated Lankum: Radie Peat, her voice as raw and jagged as a glistening oyster shell, and their drone-loving producer, John “Spud” Murphy.
This 45-minute, six-track debut LP begins with the traditional Cruel Mother, about a woman killing her newborns after becoming pregnant by a married man. After a long stretch of Peat’s voice a cappella, as in some of Lankum’s most powerful tracks, the mood shifts elsewhere: minor-key guitar arpeggios recalling the post-punk days of the Cure, and drums slowly building towards raucous workouts. As Peat returns to the refrain “all alone and lonely”, this setting has a fascinating effect, making the listener think of today’s women suffering oppression, alongside others long gone.
Peat also leads the first single Love Henry, which builds to a fuzzy clamour of madness, and Maija Sofia’s contemporary ballad, The Wife of Michael Cleary, about an Irishman who burned his wife to death in 1895, claiming she was a changeling. Kim’s vocals offer the songs very different but no less striking qualities: shades of White Chalk-era PJ Harvey on a piano-led version of The Trees They Do Grow High, Emiliana Torrini on the folky original The Feast, and full-blown goth queen dynamics on a 13-minute rout through Scott Walker’s Farmer in the City against burbling synthesisers and noise rock distortion. It’s a fittingly terrifying finale to a debut full of unsettling dark magic.
Also out this month
After lauded, raucous sets on the festival circuit this summer, the Mary Wallopers release their barnstorming second album, Irish Rock N Roll (BC Records). Charles Hendy’s limber voice and the band’s unison singing give extra welly to songs about poverty, sex and hot asphalt, cementing their status as the 21st-century successors to the Pogues. Paddi Benson, Grace Lemon and James Patrick Gavin’s Volume One – A Curious Dance (Slow Worm Records) is a fascinating retelling of the 19th-century ballroom dances played at Bedlam hospital, full of uilleann pipes and scratchy fiddles that play with ideas of dissonance and resolution. Radio 2 folk award-winning duo the Breath release a new album of originals, Land of My Other (Real World), digging into stories of family, love and loss, reminding us that Ríognach Connolly’s voice – soothing, and ornamented like traditional sean-nós – is one of contemporary folk’s most beautiful instruments.
