Indie labels have given traditional music new life in the 21st century. Rough Trade’s charges the Strokes and the Libertines were grabbing NME column inches at the same time as it released records by Alasdair Roberts and the Decemberists. In recent years, it has signed Radio 2 folk award-winners Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker, as well as Irish band Lankum, whose rawer, politically charged songs provide a bleak fit for our times. Now comes their similarly austere countrywoman Lisa O’Neill, the first signing to Rough Trade’s new dedicated folk subsidiary, River Lea.
Although she was softer once (check out her self-released 2009 debut, Has An Album), O’Neill’s vocals have increasingly returned to their County Cavan roots. Here, they are stripped raw, rough and calloused, evoking the old women anthologised a century ago by Harry Smith; a style that might distance some, or suggest affectation to others. But when it delivers these songs – an extraordinary collection of bleak, harsh originals blending into heartbreaking traditionals – they get you in the gut clean.
Opening ballad The Galway Shawl is the record’s most optimistic moment: a man falling in love with a girl who weeps at a song, before he has to leave. Then comes the deep sadness of Blackbird, bleak begging for mercy in Lass of Aughrim, and the almost impossibly upsetting A Year Shy of Three. But defiance burns, too. O’Neill original Violet Gibson tells the story of the Irishwoman who tried to assassinate Mussolini in 1926, while Traveller ballad The Factory Girl foregrounds a working-class woman proudly ignoring a rich man’s attentions. Rock the Machine, another O’Neill composition, blasts the most, though, lamenting the loss felt by Dublin’s dockers in the face of their industry’s mechanisation. “I’m losing will, love,” it begins, “my hands are soft as cotton gloves … Machine with the strength of a hundred men / Can’t feed and clothe my children.” It’s uncompromising, stunning, soul-shaking stuff.
Other folk picks this month
John Smith’s Hummingbird, a welcome collection of largely traditional material by the talented singer-guitarist, delivered softly and gorgeously to warm you in the winter. Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay’s The Hawksworth Grove Sessions marks another impressive instrumental release from Welsh independent label Cambrian. Bellowhead’s Sam Sweeney also releases The Unfinished Violin, a suite of songs inspired by the instrument he now plays. It was half-made by a musician sent to die in the first world war: Sweeney has completed it and brought it back to life.
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