LISTENING TO - False Lankum by Lankum

Featuring in many music reviewers best albums of 2023, False Lankum is a very distinct marking out of territory in the folk music lexicon. Folk songs frequently take as their subject matter the despairing cries of falorn victims or malign perpetrators of murder. For our recognition of the wrong done to them, or done by them. Containing pleas either for redemption or forgiveness of their wrongs.

The stand out tracks on this album - Go Dig My Grave and New York Trader - encapsulate what Lankum have brought to this type of material, both traditional and self composed. In many ways I see in this a reflection of Nick Caves work with the Bad Seeds, I'm thinking Murder Ballards period here. You listen grimly, but grippingly to a brutalised humanity enshrined within the song itself, revealing the tortured soul underpinning it. Each takes you on a musical journey, New York Trader on a horrific odessey on a boat in three movements.

Lankum at their best produce vignettes of heightened sonic melodramas. Songs open with a melancholic or declamatory vocal, then develop further depth and gravitas throughout by the gradual intensification of bass drones, grumbling like suppressed demons underneath the vocal line or jig. As the murders are committed the thrust of this descends into musically even darker, resolutely bleak territory, from which they are rarely to surface.

Now it has to be said, the album could not, and does not, stay at this level of intensity for its entire length. That would be unsustainable, or be in danger of making them sound like a one trick pony. What they do on False Lankum is portray a broad range of emotionally catharsis. Songs that are also gentle, laconic and beautiful elegies to human love, loss and grief. 

Listen to the gentle lilt of Clear Away In The Morning a Gordon Bok song rearranged by the band. About a man returning from a time away at sea. Though he's reluctant to return home, and wants to go straight back out to sea on a new trip. Because his love Nancy will not be there to greet him on his return. She is either dead or left him, the how and why of it is never explained in the song. He can't face a life alone onshore. Is that because he fears living with his memories of loss or guilt? Yeh, it's a song, with more than just a little sadness at its heart.

Quite how far you can push the envelope of this doom folk, without it becoming unbearable to listen to, will be interesting to observe in their future releases. Lankum thought they took it too far on their previous album, so I guess they have already clocked that one and self corrected. Hence the success of False Lankum, which hardly puts a foot wrong tonally. The track listing is so carefully orchestrated, with its three Fugue interludes. So its definitely of one piece, whilst individual tracks are still able to stand alone. This album is quite a significant achievement, by any band, folk or otherwise.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8