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Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
New Irish albums reviewed: Sons of Southern Ulster, Poor Creature, Darragh Morgan, The Swell Season and California Irish
Sons of Southern Ulster: Through the Bridewell Gate (SOSU) ★★★★☆ Through the Bridewell Gate by Sons of Southern Ulster The malcontents of Co Cavan resurface with the aim of once again visualising young dreams in middle age. Three albums in (and 10 years from their formation), Sons of Southern Ulster can safely lay claim to be as authentically Irish post-punk as any of the current native crop touting a similar validity. Sprechgesang songs such as Billyhill Hall, Royal Breffni, and the especially lyrical To the New World and Back ('I heard the voice of Joe Dolan – 'make me an island,' he cried'), place mainstays David Meagher and Justin Kelly in a league and a psycho-geographic place of their own. Poor Creature: All Smiles Tonight (River Lea Records) ★★★★★ All Smiles Tonight by Poor Creature Cormac MacDiarmada , John Dermody, and Ruth Clinton may have their limbs in other contemporary experimental folk bands ( Lankum , Landless), but their eyes remain firmly focused on recalibrating songs from many years past and adding unexpected sonic twists and turns without making you reach for the smelling salts. Psyche-folk might be the applicable category or genre, but there's something else filtering through on multilayered tracks such as Willie O, Bury Me Not, Adieu Lovely Eireann and Hick's Farewell. Think more kosmische variations of Cocteau Twins, Enya and several spectral others, imbued with sean-nós, drone, and artists such as Sandy Paton, Jean Ritchie, and Karen Dalton. Producer John 'Spud' Murphy sets the controls for the dark heart of the sun, while Clinton (whose father, incidentally, was once a member of Ireland's finest R&B band, The Rhythm Kings) delivers vocal shivers and delights in equal measure. Definite Album of the Year vibrations from this one. Darragh Morgan: For Violin and Electronics Vol II (Diatribe Records) ★★☆☆☆ Cover of For Violin and Electronics Vol II by Darragh Morgan New music violinist Darragh Morgan has quite the professional career, performing not only with numerous contemporary music groups (including Ensemble Modern, Icebreaker and London Sinfonietta) but also with The Divine Comedy, the Spice Girls and Sigur Ros. The sequel to his 2017 album showcases examples of what could be, for some, taxing. There are shades of that throughout the 10 minutes of Zack Browning's Sole Injection (think repetitive hiccups with occasional stabs of police car alarms). Conversely, in Scanner's A Cantegral Segment, Morgan's playing is peak elegance, but the album's longueurs far outweigh the best moments. The Swell Season: Forward (Masterkey Sounds) ★★★★☆ Forward by The Swell Season Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova reunite as The Swell Season for their first album in 16 years, and to say the results are equal parts bittersweet, heartwarming and wise is a piercing understatement. The pair's personal history is (presumably) well enough known to view Forward as a story-driven sequence of confessional regret and acceptance. Whatever the truth, there's no denying the empathy and common threads that connect not just the songwriters but also their folksy songs. Listen to People We Used to Be, Stuck in Reverse, I Leave Everything to You and A Little Sugar without your eyes brimming, and you have a heart of stone. READ MORE California Irish: The Mountains Are My Friends (7Hz Productions) ★★★☆☆ The Mountains Are My Friends by California Irish From bullish hard rock to harmonic folk is a turn we didn't expect Belfast's Cormac Neeson to take, but the former frontman of The Answer has taken to the sensibilities of Laurel Canyon like the proverbial duck to water. Gathering a bunch of musicians with similar influences, the mood enveloping the debut album by California Irish is, says Neeson, 'the opposite of boring AI-generated, no-soul perfection'. There is throughout, then, not only genuine creative instinct but also the kind of sonic warmth that comes only from musicians in a room taking cues and empathetic hints from each other.
Irish Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
No laughing matter: Poor Creature on goth folk, Kneecap's Gaza stance and their love of Philomena Begley
On a good day the hills around the rural Co Sligo home of the Poor Creature musicians Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada can feel like a portal to another universe. 'There's a place up the road from us. It's a TV mast high in the mountains. There's gorgeous mist and fog there all the time,' says MacDiarmada, who has a parallel career wrenching terrifying sounds from his fiddle as a member of the Mercury-nominated 'mutant folk' group Lankum . 'It looms like this incredible, almost Blade Runner-like structure.' Clinton and MacDiarmada moved to the northwest several years ago, leaving Dublin in search of somewhere more affordable. They found a house – they're talking from it right now – but that was just the start. Isolated, beautiful and a bit spooky, their neck of the woods has proved a rich source of inspiration for their magnificently haunting new album, All Smiles Tonight. The LP unfolds like a closely guarded secret. Overall it has a whispering, intimate quality, but when it gets going it's as if someone has taken the roof off the sky. There are extended passages of droning strings that rise like mist from a bog, interspersed with gorgeously unsettling vocals from Clinton and MacDiarmada, the tapestry woven together with both subtlety and impressive amounts of welly by the regular Lankum collaborator John 'Spud' Murphy. Stuck at home during the pandemic, Clinton and MacDiarmada – romantic partners and musical collaborators – started making music together as a comfort and an outlet for their unprocessed lockdown anxieties. READ MORE 'I don't think we were necessarily working towards an album,' MacDiarmada says. '[We were] making stuff because we had the time and space. We had a lot of toys and stuff lying about the house. We had the right stuff and we were in the right place.' Clinton nods. 'We didn't have a theme in mind, starting out. But then, when we looked back at all the songs, they just shared that [sense of coming out of lockdown]. It could have been subconscious, or could be that we like sad songs.' Poor Creature are a very Irish supergroup. Clinton is an experienced traditional musician and one-quarter of the acclaimed all-woman foursome Landless. As a member of Lankum, MacDiarmada has played everywhere from New York to Glastonbury as the ensemble worked their way towards an improbable global success via their ominous take on trad. They are joined in Poor Creature by the percussionist John Dermody, a veteran musician whose background extends to the underrated 1990s post-rock ensemble The Jimmy Cake – think Mogwai meets Flann O'Brien – and who has played with MacDiarmada in Lankum. Poor Creature's first gig as a trio was a benefit for a hip operation needed by a friend's greyhound – the best possible way to launch a band. Yet, for all their collective experiences, they have created something different with Poor Creature: a goth-folk sound that feels equally indebted to The Sisters of Mercy and Planxty, Enya and Fields of the Nephilim. With Clinton singing in a keening not-quite-shriek against vast backdrops of droning noises, they are breaking new ground – though not entirely out on their own. The grandiosely grim All Smiles Tonight is in the same melodramatic register as recent output by the Fermanagh electro-folk artist Róis and the Welsh-Yorkshire goth trio Tristwch y Fenywod. 'Goth folk' has coalesced as a genre, and Poor Creature are among its torchbearers. In their gloomy intensity, the songs on All Smiles Tonight feel ripped from the fabric of modern life. They are, in fact, largely reworkings of 18th- and 19th-century material. The opening number, Adieu, Lovely Erin, tells the story of William Hill, a forger from Belfast who was exiled to Australia in 1826. The LP's title track, which The Chieftains previously recorded, is a lament dating back to 1879. But Poor Creature bring something new: their version of All Smiles Tonight is framed by a stygian throb of percussion, a speeded-up tempo lending a disconcerting jauntiness to a tune drenched in heartache. It makes for chilling listening. The lyrics, as Clinton devastatingly delivers them, are from the perspective of a woman forced to watch as she loses the object of her devotion to another suitor. 'What's amazing is that so much of that stuff still resonates – the same stories. You consistently get the same themes, the same objects, the same ideas,' MacDiarmada says. 'You can still identify with these songs that have sometimes been around for hundreds of years,' Clinton agrees. 'It was Cecil Sharp' – a collector of old English folk compositions – 'who said the songs aren't good because they're old, they're old because they're good.' In rock music, artists tend to stick to the themes, and the people, they know. Not so in folk, which has a rich history of collaboration. Which is how Clinton, MacDiarmada and Dermody can move so easily between their other groups and Poor Creature. The project has also given them space to explore passions that might not quite land with their other bands, such as their love for country-and-Irish music, which they celebrate with a spectral cover of Philomena Begley and Ray Lynam's The Whole Town Knows. 'I respect the phenomenon in country-and-Irish of dancing. People just want to dance, and the music facilitates that. It's a very lively and living culture,' Clinton says. 'Not every song would be to our taste. I guess the stuff that is closer maybe to older-style country. Philomena Begley is an amazing singer.' Country-and-Irish is a much bigger industry than is often appreciated. Poor Creature believe there's a secret history to be unpacked of the many labels and record studios it supported, across the Midlands and North. 'There was this wild scene up in the Border counties in the 1970s,' Dermody says, 'where there were loads and loads of small studios, just recording lots of this stuff.' Rural music doesn't have to be backwards looking, they say. 'It's interesting that country-and-Irish can be associated with conservatism,' Clinton says. 'But a lot of people when they went over to London, escaping a repressive Ireland at that time, they loved this music, where you could sing about divorce. There was a sort of liberation, maybe, in it for women.' Poor Creature were among the many artists who signed a statement supporting Kneecap after British police opened an investigation into allegations that the group displayed a Hizbullah flag on stage in London. If you speak out on Gaza and the slaughter there as Kneecap did, Poor Creature say – we're talking before the Irish rap trio's incendiary Glastonbury set – powerful forces will do their best to censor you, as happened with the attempt to remove the group from the festival bill. [ Glastonbury 2025: All that Kneecap and Bob Vylan outrage drowned out the air strike on the cafe birthday party Opens in new window ] 'You have to credit not just the bravery, right at the point where you're at the cusp of significant success, to risk losing that for speaking out against something that is self-evidently, obviously happening, but to then ... when you are by no means out of the woods … to dedicate the entire fee to Médecins Sans Frontières' – as Kneecap did after appearing at the Wide Awake festival in London – 'is an extraordinary statement of congruence with the words you are speaking. 'My concern, I suppose, is to see such a concerned and co-ordinated attack on a group of artists from such high-level machinery in the industry. There were people speaking out, writing letters, trying to get them deplatformed from bills.' Poor Creature are to tour the excellent All Smiles Tonight, which will also surely be in contention for the Choice Music Price, among other accolades. MacDiarmada is still taken aback by the high points of his musical career, including the Mercury nomination for Lankum and that band's headline performance at the 15,000-capacity In the Meadows festival in Dublin last year. 'I have to pause and take a moment because things can get normalised,' he says. 'So, yeah, hang on a second, take a breath and acknowledge how incredibly privileged this thing is that I get to do. 'If I was to tell myself 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would be telling you, 'What the f**k are you talking about?' It's beyond what I would have expected in my wildest dreams.' All Smiles Now is released via River Lea Records . Poor Creature play Donegal Castle, as part of Earagail Arts Festival , on Friday, July 18th; the Duncairn, Belfast, on September 12th; and the Button Factory, Dublin, on November 27th
The Journal
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Journal
Christy Moore and Pulp among acts calling for ‘freedom of expression' after cancelled Kneecap gigs
LAST UPDATE | 3 hrs ago MUSICIANS SUCH AS Christy Moore, Fontaines D.C., Paul Weller and Pulp have signed a letter calling for 'artistic freedom of expression' after a 'concerted attempt to censor and deplatform Kneecap'. Three Kneecap concerts that were due to take place in Germany have been cancelled amid controversy over the group's recent commentary about Israel's war on Gaza. The Belfast rap trio were due to perform in Koln, Berlin and Hamburg at the start of September. However, the three gigs have now been cancelled. It follows two festivals in Germany last week also cancelling scheduled appearances by the group. A concert at Eden Project, a series of concerts that take place at the Cornwall botanical gardens in the UK each year, was also cancelled, with no reason given for this. During Kneecap's set at the US music festival Coachella earlier this month, a screen displayed messages that included 'Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.' The group's manager Daniel Lambert has said that there has been a 'concerted campaign' against the rap trio 'emanating from the US' since the Coachella gig. The open letter also pointed to a 'campaign to remove Kneecap from the public eye' by Westminster and the British media. 👇👇👇 — Daniel Lambert (@dlLambo) April 30, 2025 The letter added that the artists who signed it 'need to register our opposition to any political repression of artistic freedom'. 'No political figures or parties should have the right to dictate who does and does not play at music festivals of gigs,' reads the letter, which has also been signed by Annie Mac, Damien Dempsey, Lankum, Massive Attack, and Primal Scream. 'The question of agreeing with Kneecap's politics views is irrelevant,' said the letter, which called for the 'interference campaign' to be 'condemned and ridiculed'. 'Taken out of context' Last week, Lambert said the group's members have received death threats over their Coachella performance. Speaking last night to RTÉ's Prime Time, Lambert said that the 'last few days have been very challenging'. Advertisement 'To the massive credit of the three lads, at no point have they had any concern for their own income, for their own careers, for their own futures. 'At every point, they have the absolute conviction that they are doing the right thing and they stand on the right side of history.' "You have a band being held to a higher moral account than politicians who are ignoring international law." Miriam O'Callaghan joined in studio by Kneecap's manager Daniel Lambert on #RTEPT — RTÉ One (@RTEOne) April 29, 2025 In a statement yesterday morning , Kneecap walked back comments perceived to be supporting terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah and apologised to the families of two former British MPs, David Amess and Jo Cox, who were murdered in recent years. It came after a video circulated from a November 2023 gig appearing to show one member of the group saying: 'The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.' The daughter of Amess accused Kneecap of 'gaslighting' in their apology and said it would be 'very dangerous' for the group to perform at Glastonbury. Lambert said the idea that there was an 'incitement of violence against an MP is ludicrous'. He said those comments were 'taken entirely out of context'. 'They're performers and it was part of a performance,' said Lambert. 'This was a concerted campaign, and the aim of this campaign is really important. This has nothing to do with Kneecap or something that Kneecap may or may not have said. 'It's solely about de-platforming artists and telling the next young band, both through the music industry and through the political class, that you cannot speak about Palestine.' "This has nothing to do with Kneecap... It's about telling the next young band that you cannot speak about Palestine." Miriam O'Callaghan speaking with Kneecap's manager Daniel Lambert on #RTEPT — RTÉ One (@RTEOne) April 29, 2025 Meanwhile, Lambert remarked that the video didn't simply 'emerge'. 'There was a concerted campaign emanating from the US to analyse every single thing that Kneecap has ever said in seven years of performances. 'Why this happened is around what they said at Coachella, and what they said at Coachella was the right thing to say. 'It's something we've said at Leeds, Reading, Glastonbury, Dublin and Belfast. Related Reads Kneecap has gig cancelled on foot of backlash for 'dead Tory' and 'up Hamas, up Hezbollah' comments A second Kneecap gig video is being examined by UK police over 'dead Tory' comments Kneecap taking 'action' against people who spread 'deliberate falsehoods' after Coachella gig 'What really scared the State of Israel and led to this campaign is the reaction of young people in America, young people who aren't willing to support a genocide, and have empathy and sympathy towards the Palestinian people.' Israel has been accused of genocide in a case brought to the International Court of Justice by South Africa . The ICJ issued provisional measures against Israel after finding there are reasonable grounds to believe Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, where over 52,000 people have been killed since October 2023. Lambert also claimed that this is now entering the 'space of moral hysteria and outrage'. 'You have a band being held to a higher moral account than politicians who are ignoring international law. '(British prime minister) Keir Starmer was an international lawyer and he said that Israel had a right to cut water and food into Gaza.' This was a reference to an interview Starmer did with LBC in October 2023 in which Starmer suggested that Israel had the 'right' to cut off power and water from Gaza. 'Children are starving to death, and we're spending six or seven days speaking about Kneecap – we spent less than a day speaking about 15 executed medics.' In March, an Israeli army attack on an emergency convoy killed 15 aid workers and medical personnel in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police are assessing the footage, along with a video clip from another concert in November 2024 in which a member of the band appeared to shout 'up Hamas, up Hezbollah'. When Lambert was asked about this incident, Lambert replied: 'To focus in and say to somebody, 'do you condemn or do you support?', is away from the core message, and the core message should be, do you understand. 'Do you understand why somebody, after 77 years of a brutal, violent occupation, would resort to violence.' He described the recent controversy as a 'total distraction' and added: 'We're speaking about something that was said at a performance and taken out of context.' Additional reporting by Lauren Boland Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
