False Lankum by Lankum was my album of the year, by quite a margin. This is probably the least interesting thing you could possibly say about such an extraordinary album, but I was really struck by the changes of time signature in the songs on False Lankum. Several of the songs in 4/4 have these occasional bars of 2/4 or 3/4 which make the tunes twist and turn in brilliantly unexpected ways; resolving beautifully, or, as in ‘The New York Trader’, giving us a few more beats just to fit those lyrics in. It’s as if the songs can’t be contained – the metre has to accommodate the tune and the words, not the other way round. To me, this represents the primacy of melody in traditional music. It’s those twists and turns that make these songs so memorable; they are the artefacts by which a song can be preserved and transmitted in an oral culture.
Anyway, funny story. My friends were listening to False Lankum one evening. During ‘Master Crowley’s’ one of them got up to go to the loo. When he came back, the song was still playing but had utterly transformed. He said, ‘The jig… it’s melted…’
Here’s Lankum performing ‘Go Dig My Grave’ at this year’s Mercury Prize ceremony:
My other albums of the year, in no particular order:
Hands That Bind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – Jim O’Rourke
Everything is Alive – Slowdive
Jelly Road – Blake Mills
Scaring the Hoes – JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown
Albion – Harp
Rat Saw God – Wednesday
I Am Not There Anymore – The Clientele
Eidetic – Benoît Pioulard
Radical Romantics – Fever Ray
I love how the the production of the Harp album contributes to its wintry aesthetic. Listen to the way this song seems to slow down at the start, like an old tape machine malfunctioning:
Absolutely unreal production on the JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown album. Mindblowing!
The guitar solo on this Blake Mills tune contains all the wrong notes in the right order:
My favourite song of the year was ‘Heaven’ by Mitski:
Honourable mentions go to the drone-tastic Kali Malone:
And the brilliant Bas Jan (great video):
Also, speaking of Jim O’Rourke, do you know his cover of ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’?
It feels like it’s been an incredibly significant year for Irish art: the game-changing Lankum album, brilliant new music from John Francis Flynn and Seamus Fogarty, the Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, and, in Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, two of the best contemporary novels I can remember reading. It’s also a year that, culturally, has been overshadowed by the deaths of Sinéad O'Connor and Shane MacGowan.
This is a great article about the importance of MacGowan to the current generation of Irish folk musicians.
And this is a brilliant interview with the novelist Mike McCormack about the Irish literary scene:
It has to do with the gifted generation of book and magazine editors. All the writers that you are admiring – the likes of Nicole Flattery, Colin Barrett, Lisa McInerney, John Patrick McHugh, Claire-Louise Bennett – they’ve all cut their teeth on a really vibrant journal and magazine culture in Ireland and they’ve all had their first writing polished by Irish editors. That’s absolutely crucial. My generation went away and had our first editorial contact with English editors and that worked out OK. But I worked with some editors in England, and trying to explain things to them – Jesus Christ! I remember trying to explain an idiomatic expression: ‘You won’t feel until Christmas.’ You won’t feel what? And I remember then returning to Ireland and being edited by an Irish editor, and the amount of things I did not have to explain or translate, I found that absolutely amazing.
(Reminds me of Joyce! ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.’)
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is the idea of what it means to be an artist, or what makes a ‘pure artist’. It’s a phrase that was used a lot to describe O’Connor and MacGowan in the days following their deaths. Daragh Lynch of Lankum on MacGowan:
At no point was he trying to be anything for anyone. He never tried to fit into some sort of category. From the first moment to the last, he was a pure artist coming from a genuine place. That’s much rarer than you might think.
This was something I was really struck by with The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s a novel that reminded me of what a novel could be – in its scope and fearlessness, its capacity to contain multitudes. Some artists create because they can, and some artists create because they have to – because they are driven to. I feel like you can always tell an artist who, to quote Salinger, ‘can write a poem that is a poem’. For me, Paul Murray is up there.
Weirdly, one thing that seemed to sum all this up for me was the work of another Irish visionary: Bobby Fingers. His videos seem to me to be about what it means to be an artist, and the value of creativity for its own sake. Even if what you are creating is a diorama of Michael Jackson catching on fire:
Here are the books I read this year. I particularly enjoyed Fire and Hemlock and Ghostland. Thanks, as ever to Backlisted for so many great recommendations.
The Employees – Olga Ravn
Fire and Hemlock – Diana Wynne Jones
Empire of Booze: British History Through the Bottom of a Glass – Henry Jeffreys
I Strongly Believe in Incredible Things: A creative journey through the everyday wonders of our world – Rob Auton
The Affirmation – Christopher Priest
Nadja – André Breton
This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub
Last Nights of Paris – Phillipe Soupault
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media: Being the Best You You Can Be and Saving Yourself from Loneliness – James Acaster
Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan (again!)
Checkout 19 – Claire-Louise Bennett
Lessons – Ian McEwan
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1 1969-73 – Allan Kozinn & Adrian Sinclair
Second Place – Rachel Cusk
Queenie – Candice Carty-Williams
Bodies: Life and Death in Music – Ian Winwood
The Alchymist’s Cat (Book One of The Deptford Histories) – Robin Jarvis
This Is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay
The Porpoise – Mark Haddon
No Document – Anwen Crawford
Live Through This (33 ⅓) – Anwen Crawford
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing – Thomas Morris
Open Up – Thomas Morris
Ordinary Human Failings – Megan Nolan
The Bee Sting – Paul Murray
Into the Uncanny – Danny Robins
The Oaken Throne (Book Two of The Deptford Histories) – Robin Jarvis
The Sarah Book – Scott McClanahan
Lights Out for the Territory – Iain Sinclair
A Place for Me – Robert Westall
Villager – Tom Cox
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country – Edward Parnell
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (In Search of Lost Time: Volume 2) – Marcel Proust
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction – J. D. Salinger
Just picked up The Bee Sting today! You've got me looking forward to it even more