Released: 2023
The past: ominous, easily forgotten, deliberately misinterpreted, a place where only ghosts know the truth. More than ever the modern world is scared of it, the lessons of human existence too hard to stomach for those who’re trying to exploit our vain hopes of progress for their sole benefit.
Lankum don’t really truck with the idea of folk music, seeing it as a misnomer and wolf in sheep’s clothing, with founder Ian Lynch telling Malcolm Wyatt “We wouldn’t really call the music we make folk…we all know what traditional music is, and all know is that what we make is not traditional music.”
The sessions for 2023’s Mercury Prize nominated False Lankum were for singer Radie Peat a matter of navigating the mid and post lockdown psychological rollercoaster, the impact a transformation of the band into a form she described as a more extreme version of themselves. The contrasts jarred, pushing them at one end of the spectrum towards a darkness that embraced the frailer past self and our waltzes with tragedy.
Peat had first heard Go Dig My Grave imagined by Kentuckian Jean Ritchie in her 1963 collaboration with Doc Watson. Lankum’s response was to make a version that contrasted wildly, the funereal tempo and skeletal arrangement prompting claustrophobic paranoia. Here the jilted lover expelled their last breath on your cheek, her misery and hearbtreak a physical force, whilst beyond that point the ambient drone looped on, fuelled by sadness and the despair of those left behind. Allowed its head, the past died and lived here, suffocating the present and abducting the future.
The Voice Of Unreason 