Review Summary: Irish Folk gives us yet another 2023 gem
Who knows from what well it’s sprung, but the newfound trend in Irish folk of taking the songs and sounds of traditional music and stretching time and sound into something as evocative as a fever dream is one of the most welcome things to happen in any folk scene in a while. And granted, I’m basing this on a grand total of four albums released this year, but the fact that four times in the past 365 days a release has drawn that dreamlike, hypnotic atmosphere grown from those trad-folk roots may at the very least speak to a beginning, if not a movement. The most recent of these albums,
Look Over The Wall, See The Sky, while it may not match the scope of Lankum or OXN, more than matches both projects through an immersive beauty that speaks to the more intimate, introspective side of the folk tradition.
The disorienting, fever dream quality of The Zoological Gardens feels like walking along some abandoned, silent seashore while Flynn’s sonorous baritone sings from everywhere and nowhere at once, setting the mood in that surreal, dreamy way that has its feet firmly planted in the familiar. The incongruous, murmuring Mole in the Grounds and the bleary-eyed drone of Willie Crotty cement the atmospheric bent of the album, while the nocturnal, jazz-tinged mood-piece The Seasons reminisces of John Martyn, while offsetting the roaring jig of Within A Mile of Dublin. Its all in keeping with the overall mood and theme, but the sonic variety to be drawn from all these different brushstrokes atop that folk foundation make for a surprisingly varied experience.
Like many of the folk luminaries, Flynn, by drawing from both the traditional and the new, is grappling with the weight of the poetic tradition, both acknowledging and challenging the voices that have shaped him. Each of the pieces on the album was drawn from the pens of others, but Flynn more than rises to the challenge of making those stories his own. The hallucinatory qualityof the music itself speaks to the surreal, rather than the delirious or muddled. Each note, each drone, each scrape of noise or latticework of sound and texture is crystalline, the atmosphere built from deep roots and rising to strange and liminal heights.
Timely perhaps, with the passing of Shane Macgowan, that Dirty Old Town, the Ewan MacColl song he made most famous should find its newest incarnation in Flynn’s somber, melancholy arrangement and sparse guitar backed by muted horns. His rendition predates MacGowan’s death, but there is nonetheless an elegiac feel, one that, in a sense, is carried throughout the album. But there’s very much something that looks to the future as well.
Look Over The Wall is folk for the postmodern age, folk touched by the irrational, the chaotic, weaving in and out of a hypnotic haze. In that sense, it’s perhaps yet another iteration of exactly where the tradition needs to go.
